


One More White Candle

by pinstripedJackalope



Series: House Voltron [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura (Voltron) Has Depression, Alternate Universe - Foster Family, Blood and Injury, Chronic Illness, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Foster Care, Foster Dad Shiro (Voltron), Gen, Human Allura (Voltron), Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Intersex Keith (Voltron), Lance (Voltron) Has ADHD, Lance (Voltron) Has Bipolar Disorder, Mentions of Teen Pregnancy, Mind the Tags, Minor Character Death, Misgendering, Multiple Sclerosis, Past Abuse, Past Adam/Shiro (Voltron), Platonic Cuddling, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rating May Change, Recreational Drug Use, References to Illness, Self-Harm, Shiro (Voltron) Has MS - Multiple Sclerosis, Shiro (Voltron) Is Chronically Ill, Shiro (Voltron) is a Mess, Space Dad Shiro (Voltron), Tags May Change, Trans Female Pidge | Katie Holt, Trans Keith (Voltron), Trans Pidge | Katie Holt, Transphobia, Undiagnosed Mental Health Issues, Vomiting, not a main character, past trauma, sorry guys there's gonna be a lot of tags, starting with the heavy hitters:, talking about suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-29
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-08-14 00:47:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 31,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16482902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: Shiro has lived a challenging life. The good news is that he always rises to that challenge. It happened when he was taken out of his parents home and put into foster care. It happened again when he fostered a pregnant teenager.  Can he make it happen one more time when a court summons changes the trajectory of their lives?A sequel fic to One More Hot Chocolate Vigil, this fic is another major installment of the House Voltron series.  If OMHCV uses themes of found family and familial bonds to ultimately craft a story about cohesion, then this fic uses them to weave a tale about stability, continuing on in the OMHCV tradition.  In order to reach stability, however, you must first face uncertainty--in this case a criminal trial that drags first Keith then Shiro into a bitter fight against Galra CEO Zarkon.





	1. 1/22/18 :: Beginnings

**Author's Note:**

> Just like with OMHCV... mind the tags. The first chapter or so are pretty mild, but keep the tags in mind.
> 
> The rest of the fic is still in progress. I had to post the first chapter or AO3 was going to delete my draft D: so I don't know how fast updates will come out. My track record with them is... not great, but all the support from OMHCV definitely helps. Hope you all enjoy!

_Bzzzzzt.  Bzzzzzt.  Bzzzzzt.  Bzzzzzt._

Snooze.

_Bzzzzzt.  Bzzzzzt.  Bzzzzzt._

Snooze.

_Bzzzzzt.  Bzzzzzt._

Snoo—

Oh, who is he kidding.

With a sigh, Shiro rolls onto his back, staring up at the ceiling of the room dubbed the Black Room.  Just outside the window to his left, light gray skies hover above the houses, seemingly held aloft by pitched rooftops and scattered trees.  The neighborhood is just barely coming to life, a diesel truck idling somewhere on the next street, only serving to remind Shiro that the good times are now over.  Winter break has been officially lost to the relentless pull of time.  It’s a Monday morning, several weeks into a fresh new year and—what’s the phrase?  Shiro _doesn_ _’t like Mondays_.  Not first-day-back-at-school Mondays that force all the university teaching staff into a caffeine-fueled meeting first thing in the morning, anyway.

Shiro groans into the tied-off sleeve of his batman pajama shirt.  _Ugh_ , the holiday break has him so _spoiled_.  Sleeping in until ten every day, all responsibilities optional… how on earth can he be expected to wake up at six and not suffer repercussions?  It’s inhumane.

Though… there is one thing that might make it easier to haul his rusty carcass from his nice comfy bed.  One thing on this god-forsaken earth that may ease the pain of existence just enough to allow him to rise from the dead and walk again.  That one thing?  The juju that will keep him moving on a morning when he’d rather just sink back into his sheets?  A series of photos, printed on crappy copy paper and haphazardly taped to the wall just beside his head.

Shiro rolls back onto his side, propping himself up on the stump of his right arm in order to properly appreciate the wall collage and, most importantly, the three largest photos that serve as the center of the little solar system.

Photo one: Shiro and all five of his adoptees, smiling stock-photo smiles as they each hold up a piece of paper covered in legal jargon and official looking signatures.  It was taken by Shiro’s own father-figure, Coran, on the day all five adoptions were finalized.

Photo two: a copy of a picture of a photo once found in the back of the diary of a woman long passed, taken over the shoulder of a man who is cradling the smallest baby most people have ever seen.  It’s the only remaining baby picture of adoptee #5, last but not least, a remembrance of the mother lost the day he was born.  The original is safe with its owner, tucked away deep in the Red Room down the hall.

Photo three: a candid shot inside of a hospital room, taken when absolutely no one was looking at the camera.  In the bed sit two kids, one (#5 again, all grown up now) trussed up in a hospital gown, his expression just this side of loopy.  Standing beside him, adoptee #2 holds another baby, born eighteen years and two months after the first.  They’re arguing about something, caught mid-rebuttal, as the babe sleeps soundly in their midst.

And, of course, orbiting around these three pictures are several dozen more.  More baby pictures, more family group shots, more momentous occasions caught on camera.  Some of them have quality so subpar that it’s nearly impossible to make out what’s going on.  Taped up during a manic spree, adoptee #2, Lance, is wholly responsible for the terrible assortment.  He still claims, two weeks later, that he just couldn’t decide which ones were good enough to put up.

Shiro loves each and every one of them.  Even the blurry still of Keith (adoptee #5) vomiting in the sink.

Which reminds him—they need to go grocery shopping before Hunk (adoptee #3) goes on strike and starts baking nothing but banana bread with applesauce substituted in for the eggs.  They have cake left over from Hunk’s birthday bash last week but it’s still a sound threat, especially now that Shiro is heading back to work and doesn’t have as much time to muck around in the kitchen. 

And speaking of work… Shiro swings his stiff legs over the side of the bed, giving himself a good stretch before struggling into his prosthesis and its harness.  As he does every morning, he falls into a series of push-ups and sit-ups so ingrained in his soul that he doesn’t even need to open his eyes all the way to complete them, only stopping when his second alarm goes off.  Phone in hand and feeling slightly more awake, Shiro opens his door to the disorder and general chaos that is House Voltron in search of something to call breakfast.

And chaos it is.  Sweet, familiar chaos.  “On your left!” Pidge (adoptee #4) yells, skipping down the hallway away from the running dryer in nothing but boxers and a sweater at least three sizes too big, probably Hunk’s.  Shiro shifts out of her way just in time.  On her mad sprint to the living room she veers past Hunk, who is plodding down the hall the other way.  Her laptop whirs, almost loud enough to be heard above what must be a load of jeans thumping along in the dryer as she holds the electronic aloft. 

Hunk, on the other hand, appears to be half asleep as he opens the clearly occupied bathroom door without bothering to knock.  Lance, the occupier, yelps and covers his junk before realizing who it is and ushering him in to close the door.  Hunk complies with a massive yawn, closing them both in again.  The instant the door hits the jamb, Lance starts talking, muffled through the wood.  The likelihood that he’s complaining about remedial English classes yet again is about ninety percent. 

Shiro shakes his head, pushing past, only to be stopped dead as the door to the Pink Room, at the end of the hall nearest the kitchen, slams open, revealing Allura (adoptee #1) sniffing at a two year old pant-suit that Shiro honestly thought got pitched sometime last year.  “Too much?” she asks, grabbing on to Shiro in a vice-like grip and giving a half-twirl.  “It smells kind of musty but it’s not so bad, right?  It’ll work?” 

She looks especially uptight as she waits for an answer despite the fact that her first day of community college does not begin until, ahem, one PM and it is currently, _ahem_ , six _AM_.  Shiro considers her.  It’s not her normal look, for sure, but once upon a time she was valedictorian and the dual-credit queen of the House.  She makes it work.  Though it might be a little much for a beginners botany class.

“On your right!” Pidge yells, shoving between them.  Her voice is muffled by a wad of homework clamped between her teeth—what she’s going to do with it is anybody’s guess.  Will it make it into her backpack?  Will it get ditched in the hallway trash?  Who knows!

“Just tell me, Shiro.  I’m a big girl—I can take it,” Allura says, tugging at her cuffs.  She stands up to her full height, the curl of her bangs laying just a hair short of Shiro’s own white floof. 

“Uh—”

The door to the bathroom opens again and Lance flails through, practically climbing over Hunk, who is blearily scrubbing at his teeth, in order to make it out.  “Oi, airhead—yay or nay?” Allura says immediately, snapping her fingers in his direction, Shiro apparently too slow to appease her.

“Too uptight, try for business casual,” Lance says, skidding past her on extraordinarily fuzzy socks and entering the kitchen at a dead run.  A moment after he disappears from view there’s a crash and a loud “OW!”  Taking the advice, Allura nods, heading back into the Pink Room with the slam of a door and leaving Shiro alone once more.

Shiro scratches his head.  He has no idea what just happened.  Then again, it’s really best to go with the flow with these things. 

The flow, as it happens, takes him the rest of the way down the hallway and past the Red Room just in time to spot a head of ruffled black hair emerging from the darkness, the last but not least of his charges to be spotted on this fine morning.  The head of hair is short but not shorn, black as the night, and belonging to a charge who really shouldn’t be awake yet.

Shiro smiles a fond smile, mostly for his own sake.  Each of his charges holds a special place in his heart, but the spot for Keith has been particularly tender since the start of the new year.  “Hey,” Shiro says.  Keith hums back, attempting to continue down the hall to the kitchen.  Shiro intercepts in a practiced move, resting his left hand on one warm shoulder to turn him around and get a good look at his face.  Keith tilts his chin up, stifling a yawn.

Barely three weeks post-C, Keith has been doing good.  More than good—he’s ahead of his healing schedule, filled with a fiery determination to get back on his feet.  It’s great!  It’s fantastic!  The _problem_ there lies in the fact that in order to beat his downtime and get back to it, he overlooks a lot of symptoms that Shiro, hypocritically or not, would call pretty major. 

Ignoring the sounds of what can only be a cereal rampage coming from the general vicinity of the kitchen, Shiro spends a long moment examining the kid in front of him in search of red flags.  The internet really is an amazing place—for every twitch of the kid’s eye he’s got three complete strangers on some forum who agree that Keith should be taking it easy.  Shiro has amassed the equivalent of a couch-potato doctorate in Keith-Specific Health Issues over the past nine or so months that Keith has been in the House.  C-sections are brutal, all the mommy sites say so. 

Honestly, Shiro still isn’t sure if Keith can’t tell what’s serious and what isn’t or if he’s downplaying it on purpose, but either way his over-eagerness prompts a series of internal checklists that Shiro has to check off, starting with _visible signs of pain_? 

None.

 _What about the ones that pop up when he_ _’s hurting and trying to keep it lowkey_? 

Nope.

_Showing signs of exertion?  Sweaty?  Flushed?_

No, no, not really.

 _Tired_?

 Judging by the yawning, yes, but steady on his feet.  Steadier than Hunk is at this time of the morning by a long shot. 

 _Feverish_?

Doesn’t look like it.

 _Not even low grade_?

Shiro palms at Keith’s forehead, swiping his hair back, just to make double sure he has no fever.  Nope—temperature normal, bringing the total tally to exactly what Shiro expected: well into on-the-mend but not quite at completely-healed.

Unaware of the calculations scrolling through Shiro’s head, Keith huffs and attempts to wriggle free, clearly intending to get on with his day.  Shiro pulls him up short one more time, letting his hand fall to Keith’s elbow.  “Where are you going?” he asks, trying for stern.  _Channel Coran_ , he tells himself.

The answer is already obvious before Keith says, “’M going to school.”

Biting his lip, Shiro tries to keep up his stern-face.  _Hold it_ , he commands himself.  He can’t.  Two seconds later he gives in and makes do with another searching look.  He hasn’t found any good reason yet to stop the kid… but still…  “Are you sure about this?” he asks.

Keith nods, stifling another yawn.  “Can’t miss anymore.  Don’t want to get behind,” he says, which is sound logic.  He missed an awful lot of his last semester to sick days, leaving him struggling grade-wise—just another misstep in a series of missteps that put Keith back a year in his schooling.  It was partly Shiro’s own encouragement that inspired him to keep going despite all his past performance issues, so maybe this push to get back is partly Shiro’s fault.  Ah, the sins of the father…  Shiro dithers for a moment more before he comes to the conclusion that, even after everything, he can’t just keep the kid home forever.  If he thinks he’s up for it, well…

With a sigh he nudges Keith toward the kitchen, where the trio of high school youngins have spawned to ingest their weight in cereal.  He then takes the time to pull the most chaotic good move he’s made since the time Pidge tried to reteach him the newest Dungeons and Dragons spinoff: he announces to the entire kitchen that Keith will be attending school today, so would everyone please _please_ keep an eye on him just in case?

The chaos springs forth nigh immediately.

“Done and—done,” Pidge says, smacking away at her laptop.  There’s no doubt that she just activated some sort of hacked security protocol to track and tag everything Keith-related that goes into the school’s system.  As long as Shiro doesn’t know the details, he only feels the slightest of qualms.

Lance, always with a different approach, immediately takes offense.  “Dude, literally what the cheese is wrong with you?” he asks, pausing halfway through scarfing down a bowl of lucky charms in order to give Keith a stink-eye. 

Keith, seated on the edge of a kitchen chair, turns just far enough to send a half-hearted glare back.  “Nothing?”

Across the table from the two of them with a bowl of dry frosted flakes and an excellent view, Pidge snorts.  Her magnified eyes peers out from behind her large, round glasses, feverish typing pausing for just a moment as she looks Keith up and down.  “Aside from the major surgery, anyway,” she says critically.

“And the lactose intolerance,” Hunk offers from the far end, squinty eyes still focused on nothing in particular. 

“The seafood allergy.”

“Oooh, the sleep issues!”

“ _And_ the fact that you have a free pass to stay home from school and you aren’t _milking it_?”  Lance throws his spoon down in indignation.  “It’s shameful, the disrespect you have for the high school senior’s code of ethics—”

“According to the one who once missed school because he was handcuffed to a tree and said, quote, ‘I liked it’,” Allura says, on her way through the room in search of one of the boxes of clothes still hanging out in the garage.

“Yeah,” Hunk mumbles, turning on Lance immediately.  He raises his spoon sluggishly to his mouth, savoring the bite before he says, “And ’s really not like he hasn’t missed months of school already.”

“A good point,” Pidge, ever the chaotic character, puts in, still typing away. 

Lance ignores the girls with nothing more than a petulant side-glance, planting his elbow on the table to lean over to Hunk.  “But Hunkey-Monkey,” he beseeches, “you’re missing a huge piece of the puzzle!”

“What piece?  What puzzle?” Hunk asks, frowning.

Tenting his hands in front of his face, Lance closes his eyes to intone, very seriously, “Why go to class when you could _not_ go to class?”

At that Hunk nods along, conceding the point.  Pidge shrugs her shoulders.  Even Shiro, past experiences in the halls of the high school weighing heavily on his mind, has to admit that it’s not the worst philosophy.

“Okay, now that we’re all done literally talking about me in front of my face,” Keith drawls, catching everyone’s attention.  He’s lounging back in his chair, piercing eyes narrowed at the cluster of kids talking shit.  Shiro is suddenly glad that he’s nothing more than an impartial party in this whole mess.  Keith taps his spoon against the table, driving his disappointment home and waiting pointedly.

“Sorry,” Hunk mumbles, always the first to hit contriteness.  Slightly less cowed but still significantly embarrassed, Pidge and Lance duck their heads.

“Yeah, did… did you have something you wanted to say?” Lance offers meekly.

Keith rolls his eyes.  “Not really.  It’s my decision, isn’t it?  I want to go so I’m going.”

Lance nods, still looking unconvinced.  Allura breezes past the other way.  Pidge and Hunk devolve into a serious discussion about the ethics of information-gathering and surveillance. 

And Shiro?  Shiro sets about searching for a usable mug to chug a whole _lot_ of coffee.

 

* * *

 

Fifteen minutes before they need to go, Shiro finds himself sitting in the living room as the kids rush like a maelstrom around him, thinking about Keith and school. 

Keith isn’t like the others.  Anyone who spends any decent amount of time around them all has probably seen it.  Not that the rest of them are anything less than unique—Pidge’s brain could very well be on par with Stephen Hawking’s, and Lance is… well, Lance, but the thing with Keith is that he just—he does things differently than the others. 

Shiro sips his coffee, watching Keith argue with Pidge about something or other.  Case in point: he fights battles that the rest of them would drop like a hot potato.  He puts in everything he has when he doesn’t need to, backs down from easy tasks when he starts to doubt himself, that sort of thing.  For all the talks they’ve had about achievable goals, Shiro still spends a good deal of time worrying that Keith doesn’t actually know what he can accomplish and what he can’t.

A diploma is a good goal.  An achievable goal.  The kid could stand to stay home another week before getting back on his feet, but at the end of the day, going to school to finish his last semester is a _good goal_. 

And after that?  What will he do once he has his diploma in hand?  Shiro doesn’t know.  Likely Keith doesn’t, either.  Will he take after Allura, take a gap between high school and college?  Will he be more like Shiro, who took the military route in order to get to secondary school, flaming hot in pursuit of the stars?  Maybe he’ll be more like Shiro’s brother, Alfor, who took off straight out of high school to start patenting inventions and went back for the degrees later.  Or maybe, as Shiro suspects will happen, he’ll tick off the box for ‘none of the above’ and do something none of them saw coming. 

Three weeks ago, after the birth of the Little Alien, Shiro promised Keith a hot chocolate vigil to figure out that next step.  They never did get around to it—too much going on all the time—but, Shiro thinks, with a small, private smile, that there’s always time.  Besides, a symbolic one works well enough.

Calling the kids to attention, Shiro raises his coffee mug, bopping it against whatever inane object they decide to throw up for the toast.  “To making it through the day!” he says, and gets three cheers, an Amen, and an eye roll in return.  Then, of course, they do one last minute shuffle and Allura—back in her pajamas, now—winds up at the wheel of the minivan while Keith is in the truck with Shiro.  The flow of the House takes them all away in a mini-caravan of yawns and books and last-minute lunchfood stockpiling.

“You’ll call me if anything comes up?” Shiro says when the two of them get to the high school.  The minivan has already dumped out its load of scattered high-schoolers, pulling away from the curb in front of them.  Keith doesn’t need to be chaperoned into the building but Shiro offers to come in anyway, checklist at the forefront of his mind just in case. 

Keith rolls his eyes, carefully balancing a near-empty backpack on both shoulders.  He looks good.  Ready.  “Go to work, Shiro,” he says with a cheeky grin, breezing through the bullshit.

He’s grown so much, Shiro thinks, looking down at the kid.  The confidant smile, the eagerness to get things done—these are all things Shiro knows he wouldn’t have been privy to nine months ago, on the day Keith arrived at the House.  Keith isn’t like the others… but he’s a good kid, all the way from the tips of his unruly hair down to the toes of his scuffed up boots.  Shiro gives him one last hug before waving him away and watching, emotional, as he melts into the crowds of students.

It’s the start of a new semester, a new year, a new era of their lives—and Shiro knows they’re going to meet it head on, like House Voltron always does.


	2. 1/25-6/18 :: The Summons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith gets to see a familiar face, Shiro has some communication troubles, and the Mail Mounds deliver.

Three days of the spring semester later, Shiro makes sure to catch Keith as he’s coming out of his last class of the day.  It’s a Thursday and a school night but he pays that no mind as he pulls up short beside the kid, startling him out of a vacant stare, and nudges him on the arm with what he’s sure is a cheesy grin.  Shiro’s got a plan, and a good one, but _first_ —

With carefully contained excitement he guides them out of the way as the rest of Keith’s class streams past, screaming and gossiping and generally giving them odd looks.  Shiro resolutely ignores them, as always, giving Keith a once-over.  The checklist rolls:

 _Visible signs of pain_? 

No.

 _What about the ones that pop up when he_ _’s hurting and trying to keep it lowkey_? 

Nuh-uh.

_Showing signs of exertion?  Sweaty?  Flushed?_

No, no, still no.

 _Tired_?

Always.  Who isn’t these days?

 _Feverish_?

Unlikely.

 _Not even low grade_?

Shiro surreptitiously presses his flesh hand against Keith’s forehead.  Nothing.  No fever. 

Looks like they’re good to go.

“You only do that in the mornings,” Keith says, the perceptive little shit.  “What’s going on?  Why are you even here?”

“Well.”  Shiro throws his arm around the kid’s shoulders, stealing his backpack off of him.  He sees Pidge in the distance and waves—she gives him a double thumbs up and a cocky grin before she gets lost in the surging crowd. 

Make that two perceptive little shits.

Shiro shakes his head, long since resigned to the fact that Pidge periodically creeps on his email and that Hunk can’t keep his hands off of any phone that happens to be sitting, unguarded, within nabbing range.  They’re going to get a very disappointed talking-to—just as soon as Shiro and Keith get home from the _thing_ Shiro has been planning ever since Keith decided he was back on his feet for good.  A thing which just so happens to be…

“A surprise,” Shiro says, and then ducks the half-hearted smack Keith aims at his shoulder.  They pile into the truck and Shiro sets out to their destination, nervous and excited all at once to see Keith’s face when they arrive.

Said destination is on the other side of town from the House, in a quaint little suburb that Shiro whole-heartedly believes was built on a massive factory line that utilized house-sized cookie-cutters.  Each structure looks just like the next—houses look like neighboring houses and sheds look like neighboring sheds and it’s all copy-paste until you’re completely turned around and counting the little numbers on the mailboxes to make sure you’re still moving forward.  That’s not the point—the point is that this is the brand-new address of one adorable Little Alien, and the moment Shiro manages to find number 1289 Keith is already unbuckling his seatbelt, a grin lighting his face.

He’s greeted at the door by Maggie and Sonia, Sonia holding the little bundle of joy as they blow spit-bubbles.  “Come in, come in!” Maggie says, and with a quick glance at Shiro, Keith accepts the hospitality and enters the house.

He was so hesitant in the hospital—so reluctant to touch the baby at all.  It’s a stark difference to how he is now, letting Sonia hand the Little Alien over and carefully nuzzling his face into the baby’s chubby little cheeks.  Three weeks and five days since his final decision to give up the baby… in that time, Keith’s had to make the second hardest decision of his entire young life: whether he wants to be a part of the baby’s life or if he wants to let them go completely. 

He took the choice as seriously as he takes most things.  He wasn’t really up for traveling during the three-week interim, what with the stitches and pain meds and everything, so he spent the time thinking hard.  It wasn’t until late Monday night that he came to Shiro with his answer.  Shiro has, of course, been planning this ever since.

“Hi,” Keith says, over and over, rocking the baby.  “Hi, there… hello, little one…”

Shiro hides his smile.  This… this is exactly what they both needed.  He was a little nervous about bringing Keith here, even after Keith made it clear that he wanted to come, but seeing Keith holding the baby… yeah, it was worth it.  Keith tries so hard to be stoic, to keep his calm even when he’s really nothing but a whirlwind of emotion—he upholds his tough-guy façade up even when you can see it straining under the pressure.  Right now?  That façade is nowhere to be found.

The past nine months… they’ve been hard.  They all need something good in their lives.  What better than a fresh new life?

 

* * *

 

 

The two of them get home late that night.  The visit was good, but by the time they get through the front door and come face to face with the mess of the House Keith is yawning nonstop.  Shiro keeps catching the yawns, too, fighting and failing to stifle the contagious shits into his sleeve.  God, he’s so tired… he fumbles to close the door after Keith, shutting out the pressing cold insistent on following them inside.

Pidge, sitting amid piles of mail heaped up on every available surface, doesn’t so much as blink as they enter the livingroom.  She’s so focused on her coding that they walk right past without catching her attention even once.  Shiro lets out his breath.  He knows he promised to sort through some of the mess tonight but he’s dead tired and honestly the spam can wait one more day.

Speaking of dead and tired… Keith starts to veer off toward the Red Room, nearly asleep on his feet, and Shiro clears his throat.  Keith mumbles a, “Right,” and changes direction.  The kid has woken up later and later every day for all three days now—exhaustion catching up to him, most likely—so it’s been decided that he’s to be banished to the Blue Room to sleep beside Lance, who is just starting to crash from his mania.  It was a surprisingly short episode; everyone is waiting for the other shoe to drop on that one.  In the meantime, Shiro feels like it’s time to go back to pack mentality: pile the cubs.  Just… pile them.

He doesn’t think much more about it.  Keith’s sleeping habits have been fucked since the surgery, and he’s probably been pushing a little too hard to get back to school.  Lance was stressed out and triggered a manic episode and now he’s crashing.  Put them together and they’ll either even out or annoy each other enough to kick their own asses into functioning.  Shiro yawns again, feeling along the wall by the kitchen to hang his keys so he can get to bed, too.

“Shirooo… the _mail_.”

Damn, spotted.  Shiro stops zoning out and finds that Pidge has sprawled herself across the largest mail mound, swinging her arms like she’s making a snow-angel.  A mail-angel.  It’s actually looking rather nice, all things considered.

“I know, I’m on it,” he sighs, resigned to keeping his promise, and folds himself onto the floor beside her.  Down the hall a door opens, the sound of Hunk’s snores flooding the hallway momentarily before it slips closed again, Keith heading off to bed. 

Shiro settles in.  It’s just him and Pidge now, sitting side-by-side in dim post-11 PM lighting.  The livingroom light is on its lowest setting, Pidge’s computer’s brightness down near zero; it’s a calm night, all things considered.  Lance is down and Allura seems to be out, leaving the hallway in an unusual state of silence.  No music, no talking… just the rhythm of sleep-sounds muffled through the walls.  Shiro works to the beat of it, flipping through handfuls of spam letters and college brochures, some of which have apparently been sitting around since October.  Ads here, junk there—personal correspondence, thank you notes, Christmas cards.  There are letters from Cuba, New Zealand, upstate.  Bank statements, receipts, the occasional bill. 

For all that he was avoiding the work, Shiro finds that it’s easy and mindless.  Pidge helps as much as she ever helps with stuff like this, cleaning the letters out of her space and from under the couch.  She piles them in Shiro’s lap, burying him.

That won’t do.  Shiro bumps her on the shoulder, giving her his best pleading expression.  With a sigh she unplugs her headphones.  The melody of some sort of electronic music pours out into the room as she picks up a wad of junk mail and starts neatening it into an easily-disposable pile. 

Easy peasy.  Not a lot of the stuff here is pressing—Shiro finds that he managed to fish out most of the bills before they made it into the piles, so the most important letters left in the clutter are responses from family and friends that he keeps in contact with.  He flips through them, organizing them from can-wait-a-little-longer to reply-ASAP.  Then he cuts his gaze over to Pidge.  “So,” he starts. 

“Yeah?” Pidge sighs.  She knows where this is going: straight to her hack on his email.  He fully intends to open a dialogue about her need to know all of his private business—

—only to be distracted when a certain official address catches his eye.

“Shiro?” Pidge says, uncertain, when he snaps his mouth closed without following up.  “If this is about your email—”

Shiro reaches out distractedly and pats her on the shoulder, holding up the mailer in his hand.  “Uh… hold that thought a second, Pidge.  Do you know how long this has been out here?”

Pidge leans over his elbow, studying the orange packaging.  “No idea.  Maybe December?  Let me see the stamp.”

He flips it over.  Using her expert powers of deduction, Pidge informs him that it arrived December 21st, 2017.  Just over a month ago.  One month ago, a mailer from the courthouse arrived at the House, and no one even realized. 

It’s addressed to Keith.

“Fuck,” Shiro says quietly, separating himself from the sorting.  He stands up, suddenly anxious, and taps his robotic fingers against the mailer’s edges, debating with himself about what to do.  It’s addressed to Keith, so Keith should open it—but it’s been sitting around for an entire month, and it’s not good to let the Court wait.  How urgent is this?  Have they missed a deadline?  Fuck, and Keith literally just went to bed—Shiro can’t wake him up now.

God, he can’t believe he _missed_ it. 

In a rare moment of poor impulse control (his pretzel binges have nothing to do with impulse, thank you very much), Shiro rips the mailer open and upends it over the kitchen table.  A single printed page slides out, coming to rest against the salt shaker.  Holding his breath, Shiro carefully picks it up, making sure not to bend the corners with his clunky fingers.  He skims it as fast as humanly possible, as if he’s not reading Keith’s personal mail if he does it fast.

He gets the idea that it’s a court summons.  For testimony.  Sent two months in advance.

That, at least, is a relief.  They still have a month before the court date.  But who is he testifying about?  Shiro skips over the page in search of a name, and swallows hard when he finds it.  This can’t be good.

The clock over the oven says it’s nearing midnight.  Too late to call the social workers—they won’t be at the office, and if they are, they probably won’t answer the phone.  Coran, then, maybe?  Will Coran even be able to help with this?  Maybe… maybe.  He understands legal jargon better than most, though it’s a toss-up whether he’s awake and available right now.  Is tonight his A-schedule night?  B-schedule?  God forbid it’s a D-schedule—he won’t be around to help until tomorrow evening if it is.  What to _do_ …

Shiro is gifted an answer of sorts in the form of Pidge leading Lance into the kitchen.  He jolts, resisting the urge to hide the letter in his hands.  “Keith is up crying,” Lance announces, rubbing at his eyes.  His voice is tired but he’s obviously worried, shoulders tense.

Shiro hurriedly tucks the summons away, leaving it on the counter to deal with in the morning.  “Don’t touch that,” he says to Pidge, who nods guiltily.  She’s probably going to look at it anyway.  Maybe he’ll come to regret it, maybe he won’t, but right now he has a kid to comfort.  He chews on his lip all the way to the Blue Room, Lance at his heels, and opens the door to find Hunk wrapped around Keith, who has his arms wrapped around his stomach, his back shaking with sobs.

 _Visible signs of pain_? 

Not physical.

 _What about the ones that pop up when he_ _’s hurting and trying to keep it lowkey_? 

There is nothing lowkey about this.

_Showing signs of exertion?  Sweaty?  Flushed?_

He’s shaking, probably from the effort of keeping himself silent as he cries.

 _Tired_?

Very.

 _Feverish_?

No.

 _Not even low grade_?

Shiro approaches slowly, waiting until Keith can see him before he brushes his hair back from his face.  It’s long enough to hide his eyes when his head is tipped down.  There’s no fever, but the tears don’t stop, and Shiro’s heart pangs.

He forgets how quiet Keith can be.  In the literal sense, yes, because he actually doesn’t make much noise when he cries… but also in the way it can be very, very hard to see when he’s really struggling, because he doesn’t make a sound.  He chooses to keep things quiet until he physically can’t anymore.

“Come on,” Shiro says, leaning down and tapping Keith on the knee.  They’ve done this often enough in the past few months that Keith just nods, wiping at his face.  It only takes him a few moments to get his arms around Shiro’s neck, holding tight as Shiro slips his hand under Keith’s knees to lift him up.  He gets them into his own room in mere seconds, settling Keith in his own bed right about the time that Pidge comes sliding down the hall, holding a single mug of hot chocolate that she claims is burning her fingerprints off.  She sets it down with a wince.

“Are you going to be okay?” she asks, none too gently, with a soft smack to the top of Keith’s bowed head.  He nods a little, curled up and pretending that he’s not clutching desperately tight to two handfuls of his shirt.  Shiro exchanges a look with her.  “Well… tell me if you need anything,” she says, doubtful.  “Except if you need more hot chocolate, because I’m pretty sure I accidentally melted part of a plastic spoon just now.”

Keith barely cracks a smile at that.  Shiro sighs, rubbing his back until the hot chocolate is cool enough to ingest without the fear of third-degree burns.  They don’t talk.  Instead, Keith drinks his cocoa and falls into an exhausted sleep soon after, small in Shiro’s bed.  Shiro sits up and stares for a little while after that, not really thinking, just watching Keith’s chest move and his fingers curl around the edges of the sheets.  Tomorrow… tomorrow they’ll deal with this.  And the mailer.  Tomorrow there will be time.

Finally, after a short expanse of eternity, Shiro feels himself drooping too much to sustain wakefulness.  He finds sleep of his own with his back pressed to Keith’s.  The kid’s breathing lulls him under.

 

* * *

 

 

He wakes before Keith in the morning, as the rest of the house rises to get ready.  Keith is curled up with his knees almost to his chest, his elbows tucked against his ribs, jaw slack.  Shiro goes to shake him awake and… he can’t.  He just can’t do it.

Against his better judgment and every scrap of self-preservation he’s got, he finds that he needs a favor from Lance.  He shudders, preparing himself mentally.  The last time he asked for a favor, they ended up with two inches of water on the floor of the master bathroom and nearly a thousand dollars’ worth of plumbing bills.  It was mayhem, pandemonium—a perfect reason to never ask Lance for help ever again.  Just thinking about it has Shiro’s hackles rising.  He has to close his eyes for a moment before he enters the kitchen to purge the memory from his mind.  Then he walks in, already regretting everything, and says, “Lance—I don’t want to do this, but I need to ask you something.”

Instantaneously Lance’s tired expression morphs into panic.  “It was consensual, Shiro!  Totally consensual!” he blurts.

Not the response Shiro was looking for.  “I… what?” he says, short-circuiting before he blinks fully awake and into dad mode.  “What did you do?” he demands.

The panicked look morphs into something more along the lines of stricken.  “Uh… nothing?” he tries, refusing to make eye-contact.

“Lance.”

“It’s not a big deal, okay?  Me and him—”

This had better not be going where Shiro thinks it’s going.  “You and WHO?” he barks, sharper than he means to.

Lance freezes, clapping both hands over his mouth.

Why.  Why must this be happening.  “Just—dear god, please tell me you’re not talking about Keith,” Shiro says, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Hunk, who just sat down with a bowl of lucky charms with extra marshmallows, chokes on his spoon.  “Lance!” he yelps, turning on the other boy.

“What?  No!  Why would I—Shiro, that’s gross!” Lance yells.  “It’s not like that, why would you even—?!”

Shiro scrubs both hands down his face.  He wants to be calm about this, but there are some things you just can’t process calmly.  At least he manages to keep his voice from rising as he says, “You just told me that you were getting it on with someone, Lance.  You went to bed with Keith last night.  He left your room _crying_.” 

Lance’s eyes go big in his face, bugging out as he realizes what Shiro is getting at.  “No!  No no no, that isn’t—I wouldn’t do that to him, Shiro.  I love him like a _brother_ —you don’t think I would actually… do you?  Oh god, oh god, Shiro I’m _serious_ — _it wasn_ _’t anything like that, I’m not—_ ”

Shiro presses pause on his end of the conversation, takes a deep breath, and puts a hand up to stall out Lance’s panicky rambling.  This is getting wildly out of hand, which is impressive considering it STARTED way out of hand.  He needs to curb this entire conversation, right now.  “No.  I trust you.  And you know what?  I don’t need to know about it.  Don’t tell me anything else.  As long as it’s not in the house and you’re doing things consensually, you don’t need to tell me.  You’re old enough to make your own decisions.”  There, that was good.  That sounds like something Coran would say.  …Wait, why does he feel like something is still missing?  He has to think about it a moment before he realizes and blurts, “But if you do want advice about that stuff, I’m here for you, okay?”

“This is not happening,” Lance moans, face the color of brick.  God knows Shiro’s not doing much better.  “God, can we… can we please go back to before I started snitching on myself and you tell me what’s up?”

Shiro shakes his head.  This was a bad idea from the start.  “I was going to see about a favor, but now I think I’m just going to go ask Allura…” he mutters, turning on his heel.

“I panicked!  I thought you were going to take my phone!” Lance cries.  His knees bang the table as he shoots out of his chair to grab Shiro’s hand.  He holds it in both of his, sinking down onto his knees as he holds it aloft.  “Shiro, guiding light of my life—if it makes you feel better, my foot tastes awful.  What do you want?  I can help with whatever you need.”

Shiro eyes him for a moment.  Two inches of flood water and a screech of ‘it was consentual, Shiro!’ flash across his mind’s eye and he does his best to bury them under six feet of dirt.  “I just… I wanted to see if you would stay home with Keith and make sure he’s okay,” he says.  Wow, is that really all he needs?  Why is it that he has to crawl through hell to get the simplest yes or no answer?  He shakes his head.

Lance, meanwhile, is starting to grin.  “We get to ditch?” he asks.  “Heck yes, sign me the _heck_ up!  If that’s all you need then I am SO your man, Shiro!”

Shiro gives him a half-hearted glare.  “You’re going to make up the work or I _swear_ —”

“Yeah, yeah.  Blah blah responsibility— _scoot over, Mullet, I_ _’m coming in_!” he calls, scooping up his bowl of cereal and heading down the hall.

Shiro is going to live to regret this conversation.  No… scratch that… he’s already lived long enough to regret it.  He and Hunk exchange a silent head shake before he sighs heavily and goes to get ready for work.  He slips the mailer into his bag on the way out the door.

 

* * *

 

 

There is a two-hour break between Ulaz’s morning and afternoon classes, and Shiro spends all of it on the phone with social services, fiddling nervously with his jacket collar.  His boss, Ulaz, sits across from him.  He’s grading his Lit class’s first essay while also politely pretending to not listen in, even though they both know he is.  It’s fine—Ulaz is like the weird Uncle Shiro never had, and honestly speaking, Shiro doesn’t care as long as someone tells him what’s going _on_.

Unfortunately, no one seems to have any answers for him.

“I officially adopted him before his eighteenth birthday.  I know his father can still claim him as family for his will or whatever, but he hasn’t had contact with him in years—what is he doing?”

“ _Shiro, I_ _’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s a custody hearing.  We only deal with custody of minors—adoption of adults is a whole different process, and it usually doesn’t require a judge.  All Keith would need to do is sign some forms, like Allura did_.”

“But… what else could it be?”

“ _Best I can tell you without getting a look at the summons is that he_ _’s probably being called as a witness for a criminal case.  It’s got nothing to do with custody_.”

Thanking the social worker, Shiro lets his hand and the phone in it thunk to the table.  He huffs, staring at the letter sitting innocuously on the table beside him.  He hasn’t been able to read it any more closely than he had the night before, instead choosing to skim it while his heart palpitates up his throat.  He doesn’t know why, but the idea of Keith getting pulled into a criminal case involving his father is freaking him out just a bit.  What on earth does Keith have to do with a criminal case involving his father, anyway?  He hasn’t seen the man in _years_ according to the social services’ visitation records.  Did his father get into legal trouble when he was a kid?  Why is it only coming to the surface now?  Isn’t there, like… a time-limit for pressing and processing criminal charges? 

And another thing—if this really is a criminal case, then who the hell is the prosecuting party?

He’s distracted from his own swirling thoughts as his phone goes off, Lance’s ringtone (Beyonce’s Single Ladies) thumping merrily through his prosthesis.  He answers immediately.

“Hey, is everything okay?”

Lance, who was away from the phone muttering something, jerks to attention.  “ _Uh, yeah.  Generally.  I don_ _’t know, he’s mostly just been sleeping, I actually haven’t had a face to face conversation with him all day.  Pidge wanted me to tell you that she feels bad._ ”

“Why?”  Wait a second.  “Is she there with you?”

“ _No, sorry, was talking to Allura.  Pidge just texted me.  Apparently, he_ _’s been crying in the middle of the night a lot lately.  She said to say, ‘sorry I didn’t tell you’ and also, ‘oops’_.”

Shiro sinks into his chair.  “Right.”

“ _Anyway, Allura just got home so I wanted to ask if we could take some money and go out somewhere_?”

“To eat or…” 

“ _Eh, I was thinking we_ _’d decide in the car.  Either food or, like, maybe the movies or something?  He really just needs a pick-me-up, I think.  He’s all stressed out about missing school and I think he’s like… I don’t know.  Upset about the Little Alien_?”

Shiro looks down at his prosthesis, fiddling with a plastic spoon that’s sitting out on the other side of the table from the letter.  “Upset about what in particular?  Is he rethinking giving them up?”  And here he was, thinking he did everybody a favor by taking Keith to see them.  Stupid.  He should really know better by now.

“ _That_ _’s… I’m not sure?  It’s not really the vibe I’m getting.  I think it’s mostly just his hormones being all wonky.  He misses them, but he doesn’t want them.  Does that even make sense_?”  Lance laughs, trailing off into a groaning sigh, exhaustion fluttering on the edge of his words.  “ _I don_ _’t know, Shiro.  Like, if I were him, I’d be crying all day, not just late at night when he thinks no one’s watching.  Heck, I cry like six times the amount he does, and I didn’t lose a baby.  Not like lose-lose, but… you know what I mean?  He may not have wanted to be a parent, but it’s still gotta suck that he had them close for nine months and then suddenly he didn’t.  Right_?”

“Yeah.  That makes sense.”  Shiro’s mind is finally catching up, breaking free of the worried funk that’s been dogging him about the court summons.  The couch-potato doctorate kicks in; he’s read about this.  Post-partum depression.  A dip in mood and hormones after a baby is born.  He was just so glad that the birth went okay and Keith decided to stick around the House afterward that he forgot to… worry about this.  “Okay… you can take whatever’s in the secret stash in the kitchen.  Just make sure Keith is okay with it first, all right?  Don’t drag him out if he’s not feeling up to it.”

“ _Can do!  I_ _’m sure he’ll bounce back soon enough, the dude is the physical incarnation of the word ‘stubborn’_.”

With a snort, Shiro feels his shoulders finally relax just a little.  “I thought that title went to you?” he says.  He grins when Lance _tsks_ into the microphone and promptly hangs up. 

It’s not good news, exactly, but as long as Lance doesn’t try to rig anything in the master bath Shiro trusts that he’ll get Keith out of this mood.

“So the kids… everything okay with them?” Ulaz asks, eyeing Shiro carefully. 

Shiro shrugs.  One court summons for a date slightly less than one month away, one normal post-birth complication, one kid who won’t stop hacking his email… one Community College student, one AP high school senior, one of whatever Lance happens to be right now.  Everything on his plate at the moment adds up to a whole lot of nothing in particular.  There’s stuff to be worried about, sure… but it’s not worthy of the acute panicky static he felt when he watched Keith kneel on the floor with blood running down his thighs.  It’s like he’s riding in a cart that has five squeaky wheels, each of them grating at a different pace.  The noise is irritating but he’s still moving forward.  There are decisions in his future, directions to turn, wheels to oil—but which one is most pressing?  Do any of them really need to be oiled at all?   _Maybe_ , he thinks, _things will just… work themselves out._

Maybe… maybe.

…yeah it’s time to call Coran.


	3. 2/3/18 :: The Simulators

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shiro hatches a plan, Allura paints some nails, and Keith has a misunderstanding.

Shiro opens The Summons late on a Friday night.

The day afterward, he spends in a frenzy of harried calls.

On Sunday?  Well, Sunday he pulls himself together.  No more mail piles, no more screw-ups.  He overhauls the entire house, bringing some semblance of order back with a round of mid-winter cleaning.  All of the kids are required to help, no exceptions.  He does not know if he’s put down some solid foundations or if it’s just another house of cards—it’s too soon to tell.  He vows to revisit.

Monday sees them through another day of school.  Allura goes to her classes, Hunk and Pidge get involved in a science club mishap, Keith is looking forward to his first appointment with a doctor to talk about HRT, and Lance… Lance complains.  Nothing is good, the world sucks, why does Keith get to take even more time off of school to go to the doctor, etc.  On some objective level, Shiro knows that Lance is slipping down into a depressive episode.  On a normal day, in a normal week, this would be a pretty high priority.  It’s not any of those things.  Shiro spends the night checking and double-checking that he has all of the adoption papers sorted out just in case.

Tuesday is another day.  School, work, worry.  Shiro was home late after talking to his boss about taking time off, only to find Lance and Allura hanging out in the living room together like they haven’t in ages.  Allura is painting Lance’s nails and, apparently, picking up some of Shiro’s slack.  He watches silently for about ten seconds as she and Lance pause to dance to Nicki Minaj just like they used to, his heart filling with something akin to nostalgia.  Allura is the chain link pulling them all toward normalcy—first depressed Lance, then Pidge and Hunk, then a nervous Keith, and finally, at the very end, a worried Shiro.  He is grateful.

But Wednesday… oh Wednesday.  Wednesday is the day he realizes that his foundations are not foundations after all.  The tentative house of cards he’d started to stack up comes crumbling down.  The day starts bad: Shiro feels like he’s caught on a whole other plane of existence, one where normal House problems aren’t even on the radar.  He has his hands full between buying formal wear for Keith, negotiating time off for everyone involved, calling the lawyer who issued the subpoena to talk to Keith about his testimony—and also Keith himself, who Shiro realizes midway through the day still doesn’t know about the summons.  Shiro then spends a good amount of time being panicked about _that_ , berating himself over it because _Keith is smart_.  He’s pattern-oriented, has impeccable instincts, and has _almost certainly_ figured out that something is off by now.  The only question is what he _thinks_ is going on—and whether or not he’ll be angry with Shiro for A) opening his mail, B) inadvertently keeping information from him, and C) just being an absolute mess of a human being.

Thursday Shiro drops the bomb, just after a quick morning appointment at the clinic to talk about HRT.  Now that Keith is off the hormonal supplements he needed for the pregnancy, they’re starting to make strides towards his transition.  In hindsight it isn’t the best time for delivery— _congratulations, you’re going on testosterone!  Oh, and your dad is facing criminal charges and you’ve been cordially invited to the witness stand!_ —but hey, no one has ever accused Shiro of being perfect.  Not since before his diagnosis, and his subsequent disqualification from the Air Force, in any case. 

Keith doesn’t talk for the rest of the day, and then they’re right back around to Friday night, where Keith doesn’t come home until nine PM, out with Axca.  When he does turn up, he has his mouth shut so tightly that Shiro could try to pry it open with a literal crowbar and get absolutely nothing for his effort.  Shiro doesn’t know what to do about it.  Is it just the stress of healing?  Is it new stress about the trial?  Is he angry, is he upset?  Whatever is going on in his head, the kid is rapidly regressing to a strained silence, reminiscent of the first few weeks he spent in the House—mask up, mouth shut, calculating gaze out and at the ready.  “Just thinking,” he says, whenever someone (Lance) prods at him.  Shiro has his reservations about that, but he knows that the one thing he can’t do is push too hard.  Pushing against obvious boundaries is a good way to get closed out for good, and that is the last thing he wants. 

And today?  Today he’s repeat dialing his adopted father, Coran.

He just… he feels so underprepared.  The closest he’s ever come to experiencing a criminal trial first-hand was about a week after the car accident where he lost his right arm, his brother, and nearly a year’s worth of his memory to the underside of a semi-truck, and that was barely close at all. 

It happened at the funeral.  Because of the pain medication and the head injury, his memories of the service are scarce, almost as scarce as the ones of the preceding year.  Surrounded by hordes of crying people, confined to a wheelchair, stump of his arm still a nasty, bloody wound… he’s glad it’s mostly gone, but there are a few things that have stuck fast.  A lot of white calla lilies, for instance.  White calla lilies and a truly god-awful photo of Alfor in front of the closed casket.  And, last but not least, the fact that sometime during the ceremony someone brought up the question of why the driver of the Galra delivery semi had been on the road all day and night, non-stop, without a break to sleep.

The answer is still obvious to Shiro.  They say family always has your best interest at heart, but Zarkon?  Even as a kid, Zarkon was never a sentimental kind of guy.  He had one great love in his lifetime, Honerva—and even she failed to keep him from growing colder and colder as time went on.

Of course, the big bad Galra CEO managed to evade any actual investigation, and the charges Coran tried to press were dropped before they could catch hold.  It wasn’t the first time the dice fell in Zarkon’s favor, and it wouldn’t be the last—and so grew the rift between Zarkon and everyone else.

Shiro sighs.  Yeah… outside of family drama he’s never even gotten close to a criminal case.  Not even for jury duty.  Circumstances as they are, he gives himself permission to dial Coran’s number for the fourth time in the last three hours.  The good news is that the kids are still asleep.  The bad news is that Shiro has been awake since about five in the morning, on a Saturday, because his life is just Like That.

“ _My boy_ ,” Coran greets, just as cheerful as he was the first time.  He’s day-drinking with a bunch of his retiree buddies, and their ruckus in the background makes Shiro want to start throwing together his own mixed drink.  Slav’s chittering rings especially loud across the line, setting Shiro’s nerves on end.

“Am I allowed in?” Shiro asks immediately, diving right for the heart of his current worry.  He makes a brave attempt at ignoring the noise, focusing on the question that is currently sitting uneasily on his conscious.  “It’s a public trial, right?  That means the public is allowed in?”

“ _Yes, Shiro, you’ll be allowed in_ ,” Coran says.  One of his buds cracks a joke and they all laugh, but Coran just stays on the line, waiting.

Shiro takes a grounding breath.  “Okay.  Okay, good.  Have you heard anything else about it?”

Coran hums.  “ _Hold on just a tick, Shiro_ ,” he says, and covers the receiver of his ancient cordless house phone for a moment to murmur to the cluster of old men he’s undoubtedly sitting on his back porch with.  Why they don’t move inside during winter Shiro will never understand—they’ll be out there in two feet of snow, beers all but frozen to their fingers, and say they’re just having a grand old time.

To each their own.  Shiro can’t complain, seeing as he’s currently coping with the incoming Court Date by repeat-dialing Coran in search of whatever fresh news has come ‘round the grapevine since he last asked.  He taps his fingers against his ribs, waiting. 

He’s normally more composed about things like this.  You have to get used to all the custody hearings and court summons if you’re going to be a foster parent, let alone an adopter, but all things considered… this is big.  Bigger than a custody hearing, or a court order, or a normal criminal trial _combined_ with a custody hearing and a court order.  Now that Shiro has been clued in, he’s started hearing news about it from all directions.  It’s a whisper here, a rumor there, a comment on the fact that the big news outlets have suddenly gone unusually silent about the whole thing. 

They can’t keep quiet forever, because the court is required by law to post public notice of the proceedings a week before the trail begins, but for now… for now something or someone seems to be keeping them quiet.  Paying them off, maybe.  Keith’s dad is only one small piece of the puzzle, here.  There’s something larger working behind the scenes, something big enough that normal House activities have been all but eclipsed by it.

It’s a lot.  The long and short of it is that Shiro’s is dealing with a _lot_.  He doesn’t regret adopting the kids and making this all his problem.  He does, however, regret taking so long to tell Keith about the trial.  And leaving the mail piles mouldering away in the livingroom for so long.  And also calling Coran for the fourth time on a drinking morning. 

“Coran.  Co— _Coran_ , I don’t need to know every detail about the governor of—I get that it’s important but we still don’t know who the other defendants are!  It’s still just theories at this point and I’m not listening to another of Slav’s alternate universe/our universe crossover—”

It’s just not going to work.  Coran is gone, off on one of his Australian political rants.  Shiro sighs.  He’s trying to remind Coran that Slav is still convinced they’re in the reality where Nixon served the full length of both his terms as president when Keith, first of the kids up this morning, walks into the kitchen.  Shiro diverts his attention immediately, reaching out to put a hand on Keith’s shoulder.  Just like he has every time Shiro has reached out the past two days, Keith evades.  He plucks a muffin from the rack by the stove without saying a word and is gone again in the span of the blink of an eye. 

Shiro sighs harder.  He just… wants to know what’s going on in Keith’s head right now.  Is he worried about his dad?  Is he worried about the trial?  Is he starting to rethink staying in the House?  God, Shiro hopes that’s not the case… even though it would serve him right for how awfully he’s handled the whole mail thing.  They’ve been through a heck of a lot as a family despite the fact that Keith hasn’t been around for an entire year yet, and Shiro wants them to get through this, too. 

He closes his eyes, breathing out slowly.  Breathe out the stress, breathe in resolve.  He’s gotten lazy with his anxiety coping mechanisms and it shows.  He reminds himself sternly that the way they will get through this is for him to be proactive—if he provides opportunities for them to have honest, one-on-one conversations, then they will have honest, one-on-one conversations.  It is, frankly, just that simple.

The good news?  One such opportunity is coming around in, oh… Shiro checks the clock.  It says 12:27.  Opportunity incoming in right about three hours, now. 

“Maybe you could come by tonight,” Shiro says, once Coran has wound down a little from the conspiracy theories.  Shiro loves the man but he spends _way_ too much time with Slav and Louie, who are both _awful_ influences.

“ _After the simulator, maybe_?” 

The wriggle in Coran’s eyebrows can almost be heard over the phone.  Shiro shakes his head.  “You don’t have to make it sound like some secret mission, but yeah, that would be perfect.”

“ _Is it not a secret mission?  Must have missed the memo_.”

“Oh, ha ha, Coran.”

 _“I’m just messing about with you, Shiro.  That sounds good; I’ll be around sometime after dinner.  Don’t show off too hard, now_!”

“Don’t listen to any more of Louie’s stories, now.”

Still as chipper as ever, Coran has a hearty laugh before he wishes Shiro a good day and hangs up the phone.

Shiro shakes his head.  Oh, Coran.  What would he do without the man?  Crash and burn, probably.  Unlike what he’s planning to do in the simulator.

The simulator, unlike going to see the Little Alien, is foolproof.  It cannot _possibly_ result in late night sadness.  The plan is as simple as it is ingenious—play to Keith’s love of machines and show him some Really Cool Stuff to cheer him up, get some fast food while they’re out, and then start up a conversation while it’s just the two of them.  They’ll get to talking, Shiro will apologize properly for the mail thing, and he’ll finally be able to get a grip on the situation.  There is absolutely no way for this to backfire.  Everything is going to go exactly as planned.

* * *

It does not go exactly as planned.

Yes, Pidge distracts Lance with a discussion of the extended version of Beauty and the Beast until they make it out of the House, just the two of them.  Yes, Shiro manages to keep the surprise a surprise until they get to the Air Force base just outside of town.  Yes, Keith’s eyes light up when he catches sight of the massive simulators through the windows of the observation deck.

And then, all at once, he seems to deflate.  He stares sullenly at the entrance to the simulator room, which they have all to themselves for the next half hour, and says, “You’re pity-bribing me.” 

“I’m not,” Shiro promises, a little startled at the ferocity that Keith spits out the words. 

Keith slams a hand against the railing underneath the view ports.  “You are!  You keep taking me to do things you think I’ll like, and letting me get away with things even though you think I’m doing them wrong—”

Two days—more like two and a half, now—Keith has been silent and moody.  Two and a half days of stilted answers and emotional dodge ball and now, all of a sudden, the cork he’s stuffed in to keep his emotions bottled up is shooting out, so fast that no one can catch it in time.  Shiro has to give it to the kid—this is exactly what he wanted to happen.  Just not… before the simulator.  And not so… all at once.

Definitely, _definitely_ not starting off with off-the-wall accusations.

“Whoa, whoa, hold up.  That is one hundred percent not what is going on—” he starts, still reeling.

Keith doesn’t give him a moment to breathe.  “Don’t _lie to me_!  You didn’t stop me from going back to school too early, and you let me stay home even though I should have kept at it, and the Little Alien and the HRT and now _this_ —”

Head spinning, Shiro raises both hands on instinct to catch Keith by the shoulders.  Like it does with Lance, the move pauses him mid-rant.  Unlike with Lance, however, Keith huffs and pulls away, crossing his hands across his chest.  He clamps his mouth shut again, descending into a moody silence so thick that Shiro is pretty sure he could karate-chop it with his prosthesis if he so chose.

He mirrors Keith, taking a step backwards and crossing his arms.  “Where is this coming from?” he asks softly, bewildered.

Keith’s eyebrows twitch.  He throws one hand out, gesturing at nothing in particular as he says, “Everywhere!  All of you!  You’re all acting like I need to be babied!”

“I’m not trying to—”

“Whatever.  I’ll be in the truck.”

With that, Keith spins on his heel and walks out.

Pitying?  _Babying_?  That… is really not where Shiro thought this was going.  He thought they’d have a conversation about boundaries and Shiro would promise to do better and then they’d talk about the trial and what Keith thinks about it.  Maybe Shiro screwed the pooch worse than he thought?

The idea that he managed to royally screw up is not a pleasant one.  It eats away at him as he shuffles back to the truck, defeated.  One tense drive home later, Shiro sits in the far corner of the Black Room and dials Coran for the fifth time.

And for the fifth time, he dives right in, asking, “Am I babying Keith?  Or… or pitying him, or something?” before so much as offering a greeting.

Taking this call in stride just as he has the last four, Coran guffaws.  “ _Are you_ what _?  Of course not!_ Babying _… that’s too funny.  I needed that laugh_.”

Shiro pulls at his hair with his flesh hand.  “Coran.  I’m serious though.  He thinks I am and I don’t know why.”

“ _Oh, Shiro.  My boy.  Have you ever stopped to think that maybe it’s not about you_?”

“He literally said—”

“ _Come now.  Think about it_.” 

Coran proceeds to do just that, sitting there and probably taking the time to lovingly stroke his moustache.  Shiro frowns down at his hand, struggling to do the same, minus the mustache that he’s never going to grow.

Not… about him.  Not about him.  If it’s not about him, then who is it about?

Well, no better time than now to find out.  “I’ll call you back, I guess,” he says to Coran, and then heads out to talk to Keith.  He catches him just as he’s getting ready for an early nap, knocking softly on the Blue Room door.

“Hey, bud… can we talk?” he asks, feeling unusually meek.  It’s been a _hell_ of a week.

Keith blinks tiredly, glancing around at Lance and Hunk before nodding slowly.  They go to the Red Room for a smidge of privacy, not that it’ll do any real good against the nosy shits who probably followed them to the door.  Shiro sits on the edge of the bed with his hands folded against his lips for a long time, debating whether or not he should get them some hot chocolate.  Keith, next to him, folds himself into the corner.

They both start talking at the same time.

“Look, I’m sorry I—”

“I feel like I—”

Shiro shuts his mouth.  He feels like a teenager—young and inexperienced, like he’s just now learning how to take responsibility for his own actions.  God… how did this even happen?  What went wrong?

Keith folds his arms over his chest, staring at the floor.  “…This feels weird,” he finally says.

“Yeah.  I’m sorry.”

There’s another awkward pause, in which Hunk passes two mugs of hot chocolate through the door.  Shiro gets up to fetch them.  He holds one out for Keith.

Keith takes it, frowning into the mug.  “…Aren’t you going to tell me I’m overreacting?” he mutters into it’s depths.

“No!” Shiro says.  “No, I just… I want to understand.”

Keith doesn’t make eye-contact, but Shiro knows he’s invested in the conversation when instead of snapping he asks meekly, “What am I supposed to say?”

“Just… break it down for me.  Why do you think it’s pity?”

A sigh.  God, the kid sounds so tired.  “Because I know what pity looks like.  My dad used to do it all the time.  He’d feel bad that he left me alone for a weekend or locked me in a closet or whatever so he’d try and make it all better.”

Well, that’s one question answered.  Unfortunately that answer only prompts more of them.  Shiro isn’t even going to touch on the question of what Keith’s dad was doing locking him in closets.  “What am I trying to make better?” he asks instead.

Keith huffs.  “The fact that you didn’t tell me about the court summons!”

Shiro breathes deeply, letting the air leech the tension from his body.  He swishes the mug in his hand thoughtfully for a moment before he looks up, knowing he won’t catch Keith’s eye but trying anyway.  “Would you believe me if I told you that I only knew about it a few days longer than you did?”

“I’d want to,” Keith says.  His feet are up on the bed—sans boots, thankfully—and he tries to wrap his arms around his knees before wincing and letting them drop away.  “If you didn’t know for that long, then…”

Shiro pushes his drink aside, turning fully toward Keith and pulling his feet up onto the bed.  If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, as they say.  He waits patiently for Keith to come to the conclusion. 

It only takes a moment.  “…I’m an asshole and I accused you of pitying me when you didn’t even know yet.”

Shiro snorts.  “You’re not an asshole, bud.  This is a lot to process.”

“But—the HRT.  And the simulator—”

“Would you believe me if I told you my only ulterior motive was to make you happy?  Well, and to talk, but—we do that just fine on our own, huh?”

Keith smiles.  “Yeah…”

Yeah.  Yeah, they’re good.

They spend the rest of the evening talking softly, going back and forth and explaining themselves.  Shiro works them toward the conclusion that you can do something good for someone without having an ulterior motive.  At least, not in the way Keith thinks he does.  When Shiro does things it’s not for the same reasons as the man who raised Keith.  It’s a rabbit hole, and it’s only a beginning, but Shiro feels like they’re getting somewhere.

“I’m not here to live your life for you.  I want you to make your own decisions.  But I also want you to be happy—that’s why I took you to the simulator,” he says, to finish off.  Keith looks so tired, and so is he.  Ugh.  Emotions.

Keith blows a breath out, his bangs fluttering off his face.  “…Sorry that I blew it.”

“Nah, I just rearranged our session,” Shiro says, waving it off as if it didn’t take him thirty minutes talking to Commander Iverson to convince the man to bend the rules a second time.  “We can go tomorrow if you want.”

“Really?”

“Only if you want to.  I want that to be very clear.”

Keith gets quiet for a moment.  “…You know, I think you’re the only adult who’s ever listened to me when I talked about that stuff.  The… the pity stuff.  My dad.”

Whoo, boy.  “…Honestly I feel like I’m barely doing the bare minimum, here,” Shiro says, running both hands through his hair. 

“No!  That’s not true.  Shiro… you’ve done more for me than anybody else ever has.”

“Keith…”

“And like, I know I’m taking up all your time and I have been ever since the Little Alien was first announced and I’m so, so sorry—”

If the only way to stop Keith from apologizing is to pull him into a hug, then so be it.  Shiro pulls the kid into a hug.  And then brings in the rest of the kids and calls for a movie night.  They watch Beauty and the Beast, the extended version, until Keith falls asleep on Lance’s shoulder.

Whatever is coming for them… whatever the trial entails… they will make it through.  Shiro is resolute.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Consider this a filler chapter because it's... it's weak, ngl. I've been staring at it for so long...


	4. 2/7/18 :: The Obituary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ghosts, new and old; calls and calculations; late night tea time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: mild transphobia, TW: mentions of death.

“ _Oh, do you hear that_?”

“ _It sounds like a train_!”

“ _We must be near a train station_.”

“ _C_ _’mon, let’s go check it out_.”

The sounds of footsteps and atmospheric piano music fill the air.  “Don’t do that, you big dumb pre-pig,” Lance says aloud at the TV, whatever that means.  _Spirited Away_ is a beautiful movie but Shiro has to confess that he always zones out in the first few minutes.  It’s the strangest lullaby to his constantly frazzled brain.

“Don’t you have homework to do?” he asks, sticking his head into the living room.  Pidge is perched on the back of the couch, in a fake-looking meditation pose.  Her laptop, sitting open on the cushion below her, is humming at a very alarming frequency.  Lance, meanwhile, is about two inches away from the television screen, a totoro plushie clamped in his arms.

“ _Don_ _’t you have homework to do_?” Lance mocks back immediately.  He then claps a hand over his mouth, back straighter than a ruler.  “Shoot.  Sorry, Shiro, I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”

Shiro just smiles.  “If you have the energy to sass me I’m pretty sure you have the energy to do a few math problems.”

“Yes, Shiro.  I’m on it.”

“ _What are those weird buildings_?”

“ _I knew it.  It_ _’s an abandoned theme park.  See_?”

“Juuust after this scene.”

Shiro shakes his head, exiting again.  Kids.  What are you gonna do. 

With Lance and Pidge otherwise occupied, Hunk and Allura out grocery store hopping in search of some spice or other that Hunk insists exists somewhere in this country, and Keith out in the garage fiddling with spare motorcycle parts, Shiro is free to do as he pleases.  He thinks for a moment about the trial, still growing like a weed in their backyard.  It’s throwing out vines, now, ensnaring the suburbs with choking gossip.  They still have a week until the official announcement will be made, but here’s the thing—Galra production?  Has stopped short.  No shipments are coming out of the factories, no shipments are going in, and the real kicker is that no one knows why.  The million dollar question is _does this have something to do with the trial_?

Shiro is starting to strongly suspect that the answer is _yes_.

There’s no use ruminating on it, however, so instead of calling Coran for the millionth time Shiro gets started on the mountains of laundry starting to overtake the laundry nook.  He finds laundry soothing, in a distant way—the motion of it calms his mind, gives his hands something to do.  Sorting, piling, measuring soap, folding… it’s all good.  And while each load is churning away, he has time to sit in the kitchen and scroll through blogs about criminal trials, orienting himself to his new reality.

He’s not really paying attention to the kids.  Last he checked, Lance was still watching his movie, mouthing along to the words, with his DS open at his side.  The sounds of Pokemon mingled pleasantly with the sounds of Ghibli.  Keith is still out in the garage.  Hunk and Allura are due home any minute. 

And Pidge… well, she’s been quiet for a while now.  He only notices this when she suddenly sucks in a deep inhale in the other room.

“What is it?” Lance’s voice asks.  The two of them mutter together for a moment, their hushed voices getting heated, before Lance sucks in a lungful of air and shouts, “SHIROOO, PIDGE GOT A MATT HIT!”

“Just announce it to the entire world why don’t you!” Pidge screeches, indignant and excited and uptight all at once. 

Lance screeches in return, six times louder.  “No, wait, not the pillow—!”

Across the way, Shiro resolutely finishes reading the paragraph he’s on before sighing and going to close his computer.  Keith must have heard the ruckus from the garage because he’s appeared at Shiro’s side—he trades a concerned look with Shiro before he’s moving into the living room to investigate the sounds of Pidge beating Lance to death with a pillow.  Shiro heads in after, preparing himself for whatever he’s about to find.

It’s tamer than he expects.  She’s vibrating in her seat, hands poised at the ready above her laptop’s trackpad, waiting to open the alert blinking on the screen.  She glances around, as if making sure everyone is there, before she aggressively taps the button.

It opens slowly, each pixel appearing at an excruciatingly slow pace.  Keith and Shiro lean over the side of the couch, waiting with bated breath for the full picture to load. 

It’s… a clipping.  From a newspaper, it looks like… some low quality small-town production that spends more money on ink than they get back in sales.  Pidge is already unraveling the packet of data that came with it, fingers tapping away.  “Wisconsin?” she mutters.  “Who the hell lives in Wisconsin?”

“The picture is up,” Lance announces, resting his chin on Pidge’s thigh.  He goes to click on it and Pidge swats his hand away.  She clicks on it herself, full-screening it so they can all see.

It takes Shiro a moment to figure out what it is, but when he does…

Oh.  Oh, no.  Not good.

As Pidge works her way through confusion, Shiro starts to move away every potential projectile within her grasp-radius.  He takes special care to move her shoes to the front door, her laptop’s charging cable to the TV’s stand, and, as her brain works over the information, the laptop itself to the floor next to Lance.  He sees the moment it clicks into place because, like a lightswitch flicking on, she bursts into tears.

“Okay, okay…” Shiro whispers, sitting tentatively on the couch beside her.  “If you need to yell go ahead, just let it ou—”

“Sh-shut the _fuck up_!  Stop talking!  Stop, just _stop it_!”

Shiro is already nodding, silencing himself.  Pidge lashes out, slapping the cushion beside her, her face rapidly turning red and blotchy as she cries big, fat tears.  Shiro avoids her hands but sticks at her side, ready to grab her if it looks like she’s going to hurt herself or try to throw something.  He catches Keith’s eye over her head, gesturing for the hot chocolate supplies as Lance mouths ‘ _is that an obituary_?’ across the room, looking young and wide-eyed.  It is.  It most definitely is an obituary, the name Matthew Holt like a brand across the top, and Pidge, who was lounging on the couch on a Wednesday afternoon not five minutes ago, is going into a tailspin.

“The _fuck_!”

And apparently so are her filters.  Crash, boom, there they go.  Shiro winces at the pitch of the scream—it rattles through his psyche at the exact right frequency to raise the hair on the back of his neck.  He can’t possibly tell her to watch her language right now, especially considering that they’ll be lucky to make it through the night without a major meltdown and/or another broken lamp, but _damn_ if she doesn’t make him wish the kids had never learned how to curse.  There can’t possibly be anything worse than Pidge on the brink of self-destruction, cursing like a sailor.

Except, maybe, Pidge on the brink of self-destruction, starting to laugh through the tears streaming down her face.  “This is a joke,” she hiccups.  Her eyes, wild and desperate, catch Shiro’s.  “Someone is playing a stupid fucking joke.  Shiro, he’s not d-dead, this is… it’s just…”

God.  God, of all the ways for Pidge’s search to end… Shiro swallows hard against the lump in his throat.  This is the one he wanted least.  Not just for Pidge, but for Matt and Dr. Holt and the whole entire state of the world in which they live.  He never met Matthew Holt in person, but even he knew that the boy was a genius and a ray of sunshine, a light that illuminated a path through the grit and grime.  His reputation for cracking jokes and gifting smiles was well known at the university—when he first went missing there were many a tearful eye in the hallways.  He was missed.

He was mourned.

God…

“I don’t think this is a joke, bud,” Shiro manages to say, and then has to close his eyes as Pidge’s face crumples again. 

“It could be,” she says, her voice wobbling.  And yet.  She knows that it’s not a joke—Shiro knows that she knows, knows that she was very well aware that this was a possibility right from the day Matt went missing from his dorm room.  It doesn’t make it any easier to hear her glasses hit the floor, the springs of the couch wheezing as she starts to rock back and forth, her small chest heaving with sobs. 

Shiro takes a deep breath.  “I’m sorry,” he whispers. 

She shakes her head, her shoulders trembling under the weight of her emotions.  “Stop, stop, stop—” she says, repeating the word with more and more intensity as the minutes drag on. 

They’re caught.  This is stalemate.  Pidge’s search—an unstoppable force—just collided with proof of death, an unmovable object.  They are experiencing the blowout that happens when an object in freefall, at terminal velocity, collides with the earth.

Shiro doesn’t have the power to do anything but watch.  There’s a tap on his shoulder—Keith hands over a mug of hot chocolate, biting his lip and sending glances Pidge’s way.  He steps back a respectful distance to Lance’s side as Shiro gently takes hold of one of Pidge’s wrists, trying to ease her hands away from her face.  “Pidge.  Katie.  I have hot chocolate for you—can you move your hands?” he asks gently.  She shakes her head, hard, gasping air between her fingers. 

“H-he’s not dead, he’s n-not duh-dead, Sh-shiro, he’s not he’s—he’s _n-not_ —”

“Katie…”

“I DIDN’T DO ALL OF TH-THIS AND GET THIS F-FAR ONLY TO GET TO HIS _GRA-A-AVE_!”

Okay, so they’re going to put the hot chocolate down until she’s calmed down a little bit. 

Calmed down?  Yeah, right.  Shiro swallows hard, forcing himself to breathe.  She’s not going to ‘calm down’ from this, not now and not ever—what is he even thinking?  This is Worst Case Scenario #1.  This is the scene that has kept Shiro up at night, it’s possibility plaguing his imagination over and over again, leaving him hoping and praying that it never came to pass.  Well, look at them now—it’s here, and it’s ugly, and it’s not going away.  Not as Lance tries to creep over to rub Pidge’s back and she slaps him away with none of her usual restraint—not as Keith stands vigil with his arms crossed over his chest, his face tight—not as the truck pulls into the drive and the sounds of Hunk and Allura gathering grocery bags mingle with hiccups and sobs and acute distress.

Except then, through the snot, Pidge lowers her hands.  She blinks.  And says the magic words: “It’s not right.”

Shiro looks on sadly, his heart breaking in his chest.  “I know it’s not right, it’s never right when something like this happen—”

“No!  His birthday!  It’s wrong!”

Wait.  What?  “Uh—”

In a whirl of limbs, she scrambles off the couch and all but tackles her laptop, clutching it desperately and scanning the screen.  “His—his birthday is wrong!  It’s— _fuck_ —!” 

Shiro is definitely not following, and judging by the looks on the boy’s faces, neither are they.  Even as Pidge turns and starts to scramble for a piece of scrap paper off of the coffee table, babbling at turbo speed, Shiro is pretty sure he is at least two steps behind.  She’s just… she’s not making a lot of sense?  She’s talking about—birthdays and patterns and god knows what else and—

“ _The numbers_!” she yells, just as Hunk and Allura make it through the door, weighted down with what must be a hundred pounds worth of food. 

Hunk pauses where he stands.  “What’s uh… what’s going on?” he asks, looking around the room.  From the cooling mug to Keith’s stance to Pidge herself, curled up on the floor and scribbling away with tears still pouring down her face like they’ll never stop.  “Oh no, did something happen?”

Allura hefts the load in her arms onto the kitchen table, looking curiously over her shoulder.  “Did she lose it?  She looks like she’s lost it.”

“I don’t think so?”  Keith shuffles uncertainly.  “It’s, uh… there’s an obituary—?”

“No!  No, _listen_!” Pidge shouts, cutting them all off.  Her sobs have transformed into a wild, manic energy, her hand wielding her pen so forcefully that she nearly rips the paper crossing a T.  “These numbers—Matt and my dad used to play this weird number game, right?  It was kind of like a code, but I think they just did it because it was fun.  I was always asking to see the rulebook they used but I didn’t have a good grasp of calculus yet so I didn’t _understand_ —”

“Oh yeah… I, too, use normal things such as calculus when I play games to have fun,” Lance says, his tone festering with something that Shiro can’t make out. 

“—Is this before or after you’re done being a depressed mess?” Pidge snaps back without missing a beat, never looking up from her work.

Shiro stiffens, ready for the two of them to blow up for real with all the tension in the room, but Lance doesn’t seem up for it.  He just sighs a little and settles further into the cushions he’s piled on the floor, depression mode fully activating.  He raises his 3DS and proceeds to stare at its little screen as if to block out the world.  “Leave me alone, Pidgey,” he warns, something frustrated in his eyes.  A moment later he mutters, “Not all of us have siblings that rise from the dead or whatever.” 

And there it is.  _There it is_.

Pidge doesn’t respond, already moving on to another piece of paper, but Shiro can already tell that they’ve opened a can of worms.  As someone who lost four siblings in one go, it’s easy to see how this might rub Lance the wrong way.  Add that on top of depression and, well…

They’ll have to have a talk later.  Shiro’s priority right now is Pidge, who may or may not be having a stress-induced breakdown and finding things that just… aren’t there.  There is absolutely no way that there’s a code in Matt’s birthday.  It was a misprint, or a typo, or… _something_.  They aren’t living in a world where people send coded messages through their own obituaries.  That just isn’t how it works.

“Katie… do you mind explaining what you’re doing?” Shiro asks.  She doesn’t respond to him, either.  She just keeps muttering to herself.

And punching numbers into the calculator on her computer.

And, if Shiro knows anything at all about her, searching for a sign that her brother, the one truest love of her life, is still alive.

* * *

When dinner-time rolls around and Pidge still hasn’t moved, Shiro calls it.  Physically, literally, he calls—by ‘it’ he means Colleen Holt, and he’s on the phone waiting for her to pick up right now.

The phone rings for an obnoxiously long time.  Shiro waits through every single generic buzz of the ring tone, nodding his thanks when Hunk brings him a plate of stir-fried veggies and beef.  He’s not going to back down any time soon.  In a game of wills, Shiro is sure to come out on top.  She has to answer at _some point_. 

Finally, after a count of thirty-four rings, the phone clicks.  “Hello?” comes a curt voice.  As if she doesn’t already know who’s calling.

Shiro has always had mixed feelings about Colleen Holt.  She’s a genius in her own right—that whole family is made up of geniuses—and her public biofiltration garden in the university’s basement has been a place for him to gather his thoughts and find peace for many years now.  She’s a biochemical mastermind—one who just so happens to have become very unstable after the loss of her husband and elder child, an instability that culminated in her turning her transgender daughter out onto the streets.

The irony is that she and Pidge are really very alike in a lot of ways, transphobia aside.  Neither of them would ever _think_ of giving up on Sam or Matt being alive out there somewhere, not even with extensive evidence to the contrary.  But where Pidge is proactive, channeling her considerable mental prowess into search algorithms and code-breaking, Colleen just… froze.  She stopped moving forward, she stopped allowing change—change for the better or for worse—in her house… she just refused to move forward again without the missing pieces.  When Pidge came out, there was a disconnect in her mind between what their home used to be and what it was becoming, and she couldn’t handle it.

 _We_ _’ll see what she thinks of this latest development_ , Shiro thinks tiredly.  It’s bound to be interesting.  “Hi, Colleen?” he says.

“Shiro.  Punctual as always.”

There’s bite to her words, more than Shiro receives from just about anyone else he’s in ongoing contact with.  It’s honestly a miracle that he’s been able to keep in touch with the woman considering her bitterness toward him and his tendency to ‘give in to Pidge’s ridiculousness’.  According to her, Pidge’s trans phase would have been over by now if Shiro wasn’t so soft.

That’s an argument for another time.  Right now, Shiro has more important things to talk about—namely getting down to the bottom of _who the heck wrote that obituary_.

Her answer doesn’t help him in the slightest.  “No one knows,” she snips, unusually uptight.  She’s upset about it, that much is clear.  It becomes even clearer as she says, “It wasn’t me.  And it wasn’t any of our family out in that area.  It certainly wasn’t anyone with a modicum of respect for a suffering family, I’ll tell you that much, and when I find out who thought such an ugly joke was funny…”

And she’s off.  While she’s busy outlining which cops she’s going to call on the mystery obituary writer(s), Shiro hums along and lets his mind wander.  He ticks off the kids on his fingers, counting their problems.  Keith and Lance—depression, dead parents, school stuff.  Pidge and Keith—rumors, big news, trans stuff.  Pidge and Lance—living family problems, obsessiveness, dead siblings.  Keith _and_ Pidge _and_ Lance—grief, grief, grief.

It’s inescapable in the house right now.  The grief.  The mourning.  They have the full spectrum represented, from denial to bargaining to acceptance, and that’s just how it is.  Hunk and Allura are doing pretty good right now, at least… but they, too, have loss buried in their DNA, ever present. 

Shiro thinks about his brother.  Alfor… what he wouldn’t do to have his brother back.  He thinks about it some days.  There’s only one thing he’s absolutely sure he wouldn’t do, and that’s give up the kids in exchange for his brother.  His other arm, sure—if that was what it took to get Alfor back, he’d gladly give it.  But the kids?  They need him.  They’ve faced death and instability and emotional insecurity and they _need him_.

Shiro sighs.  He’s just upsetting himself at this point.  Time to dial this down.  “Yes, Colleen, I will let you know if we figure anything out.  No, I won’t let whoever did this get off scott free.  Yes, I really mean that.  Okay.  Okay.  And Colleen?  I’m sorry.”

She hangs up without so much as a goodbye, which Shiro finds very fitting considering the circumstances.

* * *

Lance turns off the TV and plugs his headphones into his 3DS after dinner.  When Shiro tries to talk to him, he just pulls a smile and some finger guns out and shrugs it off.  Pidge, similarly, doesn’t move all evening.  Not for dinner, not for homework, not to take a break and give her obviously aching hand a rest.  Allura sits with her for a while but even she isn’t able to budge the girl from her calculations.  Keith, Shiro finds, slunk away to the Red Room at some point to re-read his mom’s diary, and Hunk is silent as he picked apart an old radio for the seventh time. 

The House is quiet.  Too quiet.  Even the sounds of the kids slowly making their way to their beds and slipping off into sleep are muted and distant.  And now… Shiro can’t sleep.  It’s the wee hours of the morning and he’s still awake.

He just… he can’t get the grainy photocopy of the obituary out of his head.  Wisconsin… Pidge was right, what the hell is even out in Wisconsin?  Nothing, that’s what.  Some farmland, some mountains maybe… and the obituary of one Matthew Holt.  What are the odds?  The more he thinks about it, the more he teeters on his resolve, and the more he thinks that Pidge might be on to something.

But she can’t be.  People _don_ _’t come back from the dead_.  Especially not people who went missing from their dorm rooms four years ago and haven’t been heard from since.

Still… Shiro plays another game of ‘this or that’.  Would he give up Pidge to get Matt back from the grave?  Would he give his other arm for someone else’s brother?  He doesn’t know.  It’s a hard decision to make. 

The ghosts of their pasts are all awake and watching as Shiro sighs and heaves himself from his purple sheets.  Lance’s family… Keith’s mother… Matt Holt… Alfor… the list goes on.  Their silent stares follow Shiro from his room to the kitchen.  He’s going to make himself some tea, he decides. 

He finds Keith and Pidge in the living room.  They’re sitting side by side on the couch, both wide awake, Pidge picking at her laptop while Keith rubs his temples.  An upset Keith up in the middle of the night isn’t anything new, and neither is a Pidge up way past her bedtime, but after the events of the day Shiro’s heart goes out to them.

Especially when Pidge says, “I just want to find him.”

And Keith follows up with, “I just want to be left alone.”

Isn’t that just the way it goes.  Pidge clumsily reaches to the side to pat Keith on the chest, eyes never leaving her screen.  He grunts, knocking her away from his nipple-region with a sour look that she completely ignores. 

Shiro doesn’t know for certain what he would give to have Matt back.  Give his arm?  Give his life?  He thinks… yeah.  Yeah, he probably would.  He’d give up an integral part of himself to get back just one of the people who have left them behind.

Sixteen ghosts watch on solemnly as Shiro goes to prepare three mugs of chamomile tea.  Sixteen and counting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cheers.


	5. 2/11/18 :: The Announcement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam has some news, Allura opens up, and Shiro tries something new in the kitchen.

Shiro dedicates Sunday morning to letters. 

His letters, a tradition he alone keeps with the rare addition of Lance or Keith, are his way of connecting to the people who are, were, and never will be in his life again.  Sitting alone in his room with his box of stationery supplies, he pens in each name with exceeding care.  Dear Coran, Dear Alfor… Dear Matt.

He’s unsure what to say at first.  Does he express the anger or the worry?  The fear or the gratefulness?  Does he let out his frustration or hold it in?  What do you say when you have everything inside you, pushing to get out? 

In the end he goes with all of it, pouring his emotions out onto the paper until he’s run dry and nothing else comes up when he cranks the handle.  It’s a long letter, and he wonders, when he’s finished, if in another universe he and Matt had a relationship of their own.  There must be a universe out there where they spent weeks, months together—a universe where Shiro could embrace Matt as a friend after a long time apart.  He wonders what that might be like.

Unfortunately or not, this universe is not that one.  All Shiro has to offer are a lot of one-sided words that will never find their way to the eyes or ears of a boy lost to time, and even those are already becoming stale as they weigh down his hand.  He sighs.  He’s ready to emerge from his emotional cocoon, he thinks.  It’s time.

At least it is, until Hunk knocks softly on the door and says, “Shiro?  Can I talk to you?”  He’s already tearing up, his lower lip wobbling dangerously, and Shiro waves him inside without a word.  He’s thinking about his moms, Shiro can already tell.

And he is.  To the gentle sound of snow in the wind patting against the window, on an overcast day already dedicated to ghosts, Hunk talks about how now that his birthday has passed he has less than a year until he turns eighteen.  And he’s happy where he is, he’s glad Shiro adopted him, but there’s still a part of him that wishes his moms could have taken him back.  Luck was against them, though, and their legal troubles got worse instead of better at every turn, and instead of taking Hunk back from the group home they had to watch as Shiro took him in and… it’s hard.

Shiro nods along, knowing all too well what Trigel and Ryner went through trying to keep their kid.  The lawyers and legal costs were only one part of their struggle—when Ryner had to postpone her retirement, the slander and smear-campaign that cropped after their case went viral on social media almost cost her her job.  Her boss, Lubos, nearly let her go just to keep the PR nightmare under control.  Phone calls, day in and day out… spray paint on their home… it was bad.

At least it’s cooled off now.  The public focus dropped off after not too long.  Now, it’s just Hunk and Shiro, sitting in silence, both thinking their thoughts.  For a long moment, everything is still except the snow and the thoughts and the ghosts… right up until Hunk opens his mouth again.

He goes back farther this time.

“Food is like… the only connection that I have to my birth parents.  Whoever they were.  And I mean, food means a lot to me—food brings people together, it keeps the gears of civilization turning.  It’s so important… but it’s not everything.  And sometimes I think that it’s just—not enough?”

Shiro gets that.  His younger years were soaked in Vietnamese immigrant culture, his parents both fresh off the boat, as they say.  When he was taken out of their house and they were deported back to Vietnam, everything changed drastically.  It wasn’t just the shock of suddenly having a bedtime and three square meals a day… it was also the fact that there was no one around who could make bánh cuốn for him anymore.  The fact that food from the Vietnamese take-out place in the city was more Americanized than he remembered.  It was a taste of home, but a bitter-sweet one.  It was never quite the same as laying between his parents on their futon, mouthing out English to them and turning it into a game to help even out the rough edges of their strong Vietnamese accents.

“Do you ever feel like you’ve lost something?” Hunk asks.  Shiro can only nod, a knot in his throat.  He does.  His life has been fulfilling, and he loves Coran and his brother and the kids, but… he had to give a lot up in order to get here.

He doesn’t remember much Vietnamese anymore.  That doesn’t matter much.  He pulls out his stationary again and starts teaching it to Hunk in the dimness of the Black Room.  It’s not a fair substitute for the Samoan that Hunk never got the chance to learn, assuming his birth parents knew it at all, but it’s something more than empty recipes.

* * *

Keith is moody and quiet.  Pidge is quiet and moody.  Shiro deals with both of them, coaxing meals into them and trying to get them both to take breaks, Keith from his piling homework and Pidge from her search.  When they’re both as taken care of as he can manage he turns his efforts on the broken shower head in the hallway bathroom, marking down the make and model of it so they can get a decent replacement soon.  He tries to buoy Hunk up a little more by offering to let him do the replacement instead of calling a plumber, which works for a little while… only for Hunk to lose interest halfway through, sitting on the floor with a sigh and the parts spread out around him.  He taps his screwdriver against some metal tube, lost in thought, though he tries to smile and promises he’ll get it done when Shiro knocks on the door.  Shiro leaves him be.

Three kids checked off, Shiro continues on his way down the checklist.  Lance, next.  Lance, who slept late every day of the week before and would probably sleep clear through Sunday to dinner-time if Shiro let him.  It’s been a struggle getting him out to school day after day.  He’ll go, sure, but only if someone pressures him the entire way through getting himself presentable and out the door.  Homework is almost a lost cause in this state, but with _enough_ pressure, Shiro can get him through it.

Lance groans and throws a pillow at the door when Shiro tries to go into the Blue Room.  “It’s Sunday!” he shouts.  Shiro sighs and closes the door again.  He’ll try again in an hour, maybe with a hot pocket.

Which brings him to the final name on the list.  Allura, in the Pink Room.  Shiro knocks softly.

She lets him in with a smile.  She’s doing good—the only one who is really thriving right now.  For once in Shiro’s life, Allura is on track, the least of his worries.  Unfortunately, that means almost nothing with the way everyone else’s mood is tanking, but… it’s something.

In the end, it’s Allura who convinces Lance to get up.  He announces his presence in the kitchen by telling everyone within earshot that he’s not doing Valentines Day this year.

What is life if Lance doesn’t even want to do Valentines Day?  Shiro doesn’t know.  He is a husk of a man.  What is there to do?  He isn’t even allowed to clean the bathroom since the time that he accidentally dipped his entire right hand into a bucket of water and shorted one of the sensors in it, but he does watch while Allura spearheads the rest of the kids in a synchronized attack on the hard water stains in the tub.  The four youngsters grumble the entire way.  They disperse to their moping again as soon as Allura is otherwise occupied.

That’s it.  It’s time for a hot chocolate vigil.  Shiro marches into the kitchen.

“Shiro, Keith wants to do parkour,” Lance says as soon as he walks in.  He’s doing some kind of low-impact yoga on the kitchen rug as Keith sits, pouting, next to him.

“Why?” Shiro asks, suspicious.

Keith lets out a barely-there sigh.  “So I can free-run away from my problems,” he says in a monotone that leaves it hard to tell if he’s joking or not.

It’s a two-jumbo-marshmallows kind of day, it seems.  Shiro opens the hot coco tin, already reaching for a spoon and—the tin is nearly empty.  Someone forgot to put their hot chocolate mix on the grocery list.

Shiro stares unseeing out the window for a long moment before he steps over Lance and goes for his winter coat.

* * *

Shopping should be a soothing activity, but Shiro just feels numb.  Like there’s something missing, that he forgot to account for.  One more cog that’s still waiting to click into place as he wanders through the bananas, staring fuzzily at all the little brown spots.  The brown spots stare back.  He waits.

“Shiro!”

Ah.  Now the nightmare is complete.  Shiro turns pleading eyes up at the spray nozzles above the produce, begging any god that’s listening to just leave him be for a moment.  No such luck—when he turns around Adam is still there, panting lightly from his jog across the store.

“Adam!” Shiro manages to say, smiling the fake smile that he reserves for public encounters with his ex.  They didn’t exactly leave things on the best of terms—their relationship these days is superficial cheer balanced on top of a whole lot of bad blood under the bridge.  They manage to get by only by resolutely pretending that they are old acquaintances and nothing more.

Oddly, though, Adam brushes off the pleasantries.  “I’ve been meaning to call you.  Do you have a minute to talk?”

Shiro looks at the cucumber in his hand as if it’ll suddenly become a pressing appointment on the other side of the country.  It does not.  He sighs a little, putting it down.  “Sure.  I’ve got some time.  What’s up?”

Adam pulls up beside him, basket tucked into his elbow.  He gestures for them to move out of the way of a harried-looking mother shopping for chives, clearing his throat before he begins.  “It’s… it’s a little hard to say.  It’s just—I know you’re fond of the man so I thought you should know.”

“Know what?” Shiro asks, his anxiety slowly creeping up his spine.

“Iverson.  He’s taking a leave of absence from the garrison.”

Hm.  Interesting, but not worth the layer of worry on Adam’s face.  “He’s of the age to take a sabbatical or two, that’s not that strange—” Shiro starts.

Adam is already shaking his head.  “It has to do with the trial.  I know you know about it—everyone knows.  I just thought you ought to, well… I’ll stop talking now.  You know the important part.  Just… take care of yourself through all of this, Takashi.”

And, with a slap on the shoulder, Adam leaves him staring, bewildered, into empty space.

What the _heck_ was _that_? 

Shiro ponders about it through the next seven aisles.  While he’s sniffing tea boxes, trying to remember which one Allura used to like, he ponders.  Iverson… and the trial.  The trial involving Keith’s dad?  Does Keith’s dad have something to do with Iverson?  Or vice versa?  That might make sense… Keith was born in the hospital nearest the base, the VA hospital.  Could Mr. Kogane have been a serviceman? 

Maybe so… maybe so.  Shiro thinks back to Christmas, to the package that Keith got from his father, the knife inside.  ‘Things of his mother’s’ he’d said… so maybe the knife belonged to her?  She must have been too young to be military—she died at seventeen.  But his dad was a little older, right?  So…

Shiro shakes himself.  He’s in line for the register, this is no time to be getting distracted.  He doesn’t know enough to tell what’s going on.  Whatever Adam was trying to warn him about he’s got no idea, but… it’ll become clear when it needs to become clear, he’s sure of that much.

He tucks this piece of the puzzle aside all the other assorted jigsaw pieces he’s collected over the last few weeks, keeping them close-by for whenever the time is right.

* * *

Back at the house, things are down key and unhappy.  Shiro unloads groceries by himself, knowing all too well that he’s not about to get the kids to do anything else around the house today.  It’s just one of those days.  He’ll manage on his own.

Careful of the instructions on the index card taped on the top of the hot coco tin, Shiro sets about mixing a new batch of hot chocolate mix.  Three spoonfuls of powdered lactose-free milk… a dash of red chile powder… the tiniest sprinkle of nutmeg… there.  He sniffs the mix, hoping he measured everything right.  He can’t tell from a whiff, though, and has to sneeze into his elbow.  Well, fine.  He’ll just have to make a mug and see if it came out okay.

One mug later and he nods in satisfaction.  It seems as if he’s scraped by—it’s not quite as good as when Hunk does it, but it’ll do.  He quickly prepares another five mugs, watching them go round in the microwave two at a time.

When he delivers the first one, Keith just sighs and takes it, accepting that today is bad enough to require an impromptu vigil.  “Thanks,” he mumbles, stirring listlessly.  Shiro ruffles his hair and checks him off the list.

Second in line, Pidge barely grunts, refusing to look up from her computer.  Her face is wreathed in greenish light that makes her look a little ghoulish.  Shiro waits until she glances over at the mug, making sure she knows it’s there, before he heads off to the next one.

Hunk is skeptical when Shiro says he mixed it himself, but after a few affirming sips he nods and breaks out into a smile.  “You did it!” he says, holding up his hand for a high five.  Shiro grins back and smacks their hands together.  He rides high on the praise that he’s not completely useless in the kitchen all the way to Lance.

Lance, meanwhile, has finished with his attempt at yoga and has now retracted all his gangly limbs into a blanket fort in the closet of the Blue Room.  His face is lit by the screen of his 3DS, and he looks up with huge, tired eyes when Shiro leans in.  “Oh,” he says.  “Hey.  How was your trip?”

Shiro shrugs, unsure himself.  He neglects to tell Lance about Adam’s cryptic news, instead telling him a story of a little girl he saw sucking on an unopened packet of tuna mix.  Lance giggles at the image before retreating back into his depression den. 

Finally, last but not least, Shiro taps on Allura’s door.  She swings it open with an eyebrow raised.  “Here,” he says, holding out the final mug to her.

She takes it with a small frown.  “Shiro… remember a long time ago when you said that you guys talk through pain as many times as you need to in order to heal the long-term ache?”

Yeah.  Shiro remembers that.  It was just after he learned the news of the Little Alien’s other parent, on a day that Keith finally broke down and told the story of Sendak.  “Sure.  Why do you mention it?” he asks.

She bites her lip for a long time, eyes on the mug in her hands, before she blows out a sigh and says, “Nevermind.”

She closes her door and Shiro wonders what it will really take to lift everyone’s spirits, to keep them on track.  He feels like he’s running out of time to make things better but he just… he doesn’t know what to _do_.

The thought is still on his mind late that night.  He lies awake, staring at the ceiling as he thinks and thinks and thinks.  It’s stressing him out, wondering what it all even means.  Running out of time?  Time for what?  Time _before_ what?  What exactly is on their horizon that’s so horrendously dangerous?

He lies on his back and listens to the house, wondering if anyone is still awake.  Keith, maybe?  Worried about his dad in the dead of night?  Or Pidge, more likely, still up and typing away at her algorithms like one last semi-colon will bring her brother back.  Has Lance made it back into his bed?  Is Hunk sleeping soundly after the talk they had that morning?  Or is he up and about, searching for the one food that will fill the void in his chest?

It’s only after a good few moments lost in thought that Shiro realizes there actually are footsteps out in the hallway.  He rolls onto his side, listening intently.  Too light to be Hunk—too heavy to be Pidge.  Lance, maybe?  Keith?

Shiro is about to call out when the doorknob to the Black Room slowly begins to turn, light from down the hall flooding around the edges of the door.

It’s not Keith _or_ Lance.  It’s Allura.

“Hey,” he says, sitting up.  “Are you okay?  What’s going on?  Is something wrong?”  She was so strange earlier, bringing up that conversation from forever ago… it would just figure that she’s upset about something.  A situation for every kid, and none of them anywhere near resolution, just flaring up higher and higher—

She gestures quickly with her hands, catching him before he spirals away.  “Nothing’s wrong!  Settle, Shiro.”

Like a dog obeying a command, Shiro settles.  His eyes are wide as he watches her make her way around the foot of the bed until she can climb up and claim the space next to him, just like Hunk did before her.  The only difference is that this is the first time he can remember _Allura_ coming to him.

They don’t talk, at first.  He tries not to make it awkward.  _Let her talk first_ , he thinks to himself.  _Let her initiate_. 

She does move first, but it’s not to talk.  As if by magic, she produces a mouse from the confines of her hair and lays looking at the ceiling, her fingers running rhythmically down its little tail.  Shiro mimics her, minus the petting—flat on his back, eyes toward the sky, hand on his stomach.

Finally, the words come.  “So… I wanted to say thank you.  And… I’m sorry.”

Shiro is so frozen in place that he forgets to respond for a moment.  He clears his throat when Allura looks over, coughing into his left fist.  “Uh… sorry about, about what?” he asks.  Was that natural?  Is he doing okay?  The last thing he wants is to scare her away.

Fortunately, she’s resolute in whatever decision she’s made.  The decision to finally talk, maybe.  To pick off the rotten scabs of past wounds that have festered for years too long.  She purses her lips in the darkness, aiming her gaze back at the ceiling.  “I’ve been pretty… bad… to you the last few years.”

Shiro shifts a little, pulling his sheet up higher around his waist.  “Yeah, well… we each have our burdens.”

“Shiro…”

“Allura.”

She sighs.  “You say that like you’ve already forgiven me.”

He has.  It’s not the answer she wants to hear, probably, but he forgave her before any of this began.  He forgave her when she was eleven and ran away from him at the park, causing Coran to just about lose his mind with worry.  He knows what loss does, and he knows that she probably won’t forgive herself so easily for the pain she’s caused as she suffered, but he’s already put it to rest.

He tells her as much.  When he looks over again, she’s brushing a tear from one eye, still staring up, up, up.

“You’re a good man,” she says.  “I don’t know what we would do without you.”

Well, that’s okay.  He’s not planning on going anywhere.  He lets his presence do the talking, scooting over until their elbows are interlocked.

They stay there for a long while.  At least fifteen minutes, if Shiro’s internal clock is working right.  After a short eternity, however, Allura decides that she needs to move and pushes herself up against the headboard.  “Also you know the trial was officially announced, right?” she asks, flicking her phone on.

“Fuck, it was?”

“Yeah.  I looked it up for you.  Here…”

She hands over the device.  Shiro squints at the overly bright screen in the darkness, trying to read the teeny-tiny text until Allura laughs and pulls it back.  “I’ll read it to you,” she says, and he can hear the ‘old man’ she mentally tacks on to the end.

Whatever.  Her loss.  Shiro listens as she picks out the most relevant parts, speaking them into existence.

1) The charges against a certain Mr. Kogane were dropped, meaning Keith’s dad must have taken a plea deal.

2) He’s no longer on the chopping block.

3) Someone else is. 

4) And that someone is…

“It’s…”

Shiro can’t take the wait.  “Who?  Who is the defendant?”

Allura’s voice curdles with anger as she spits out the name.  “It’s… _Zarkon_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cheers!


	6. 2/17/19 :: The Drive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kitty Rose gets up and running; Allura and Keith become renegades; Pidge and Shiro have a scare.

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

Hunk pushes two fingers together, nervously watching as Keith wheels the cherry red motorcycle from the garage for the very first time since they got it in there.  They’ve both been over it half a dozen times in the past hour—they’re at a point where they need a test drive in order to figure out what to do next.  Keith, of course, volunteered.

“Of course I’m sure,” he says, his face set in determination underneath the skateboard helmet that Shiro dug out of a box in the garage.  He’s got one of Coran’s old leather jackets on, the sleeves pulled down over his fingerless gloves and a scarf wrapped securely around the popped collar.  He looks ready.  “You can still come with me, you know.”

“Nooo way,” Hunk says, adamant.  “I’m staying on my own two feet for this, thank you.”

Keith rolls his eyes a little, probably about the fact that Hunk is wearing a second helmet, a bicycle one this time, despite being absolutely resolute in his decision to let Keith do the actual testing.  “You _sure_?” Keith asks, teasing.

“Yeah, no.  You know that yellow three-wheeler from the shop, the one that looks like it could roll over and come out the other side without a dent?  _That_ _’s_ the one I’d rather ride.  Why didn’t we get that one, again?”

Keith shrugs and flicks open the choke lever.  His hands are sure on the ignition as he turns the key, and then on the start button as he flicks it on.  The bike comes to life with a roar and he slowly twists the throttle, a grin spreading across his face. 

Lance cheers.  Hunk twitters with nerves.  Shiro stands with his hand ready to grab his phone and call 911, just in case.

Which is totally and completely unnecessary, he comes to understand, as he watches Keith slowly accelerate.  The kid is obviously in control.  He reaches the end of the street in about fifteen seconds and hangs a quick spin at the stop sign, looking both ways, then he’s zooming back the other way.  He raises one fist in the air, pumping it triumphantly as he shoots past them the other way, and as he goes Shiro realizes that he’s never… met Keith.  Not really, not like this.  Not without the constant fatigue and anxiety of the Little Alien, or the despondency that’s come after.  Maybe, for a moment after the birth, someone similar came to the surface, but other than that small instance… this is a purer, more basic form of Keith than he’s yet seen.

It’s as disheartening as it is uplifting.

Shiro, Lance, and Hunk keep an eye on Keith as he does a few laps up and down the street.  The bike seems to be doing fairly well—it sounds consistent enough to Shiro’s untrained ears.  Not as steady as a jet engine, maybe, but then again few things are.  After his third round, Keith starts to slow, letting Hunk trot along beside him as the two of them get around to talking mechanics.  Shiro nods at Keith as they pass, then sits down at the porch table, trusting that Hunk has everything under control.

Pidge, already perched on the other porch chair, doesn’t so much as acknowledge him.  They convinced her to come outside with them somehow, but the moment she was out she turned to her calculations, ignoring the rest of them as she muttered to herself.  She’s still doing it, Shiro finds—he surreptitiously leans over, subtly trying to listen in.  Not that she seems to mind—she’s completely absorbed in whatever the heck she’s doing.

“Can’t disappear unless I can get rid of the paper files… ugh!” she’s saying, scribbling on some scrap paper that’s smaller than her palm, her handwriting cramped on it.

“Disappear from where?” Shiro asks.

“The system!” she snaps, before she blinks and realizes what she said.  “Uh…”

Shiro sighs.  “Pidge, we’ve talked about this.  You’re not going off the grid.  Not until you’re eighteen and you choose to move out.” 

“Right,” she mumbles, unconvincingly.  Shiro frowns down at her as the boys pass again, on the other side of the street.  It is what it is.  They’ll have to talk about it later, when Pidge is being less… Pidge.

* * *

Two hours later, standing in the living room, Shiro resists the urge to snort with laughter.  ‘Later’, it seems, is going to have to wait a bit longer.  This is because Pidge is dead asleep on a bundle of blankets on the living room floor, her glasses askance.  She’s apparently beat after a morning in the sun—Shiro can’t tell for certain if it’s because she was exposed to the elements for the first time in a month or if it’s because she hasn’t really been sleeping.  Either way, she’s completely dead to the world as Keith and Hunk do their last tweaks on the bike.

Shiro, ever the considerate father, leans over to pluck the specs from her face before she can crush them flat.  The frames used to be Matt’s, before their parents let him get lasik—he gave them to her when he left for college.  When she first came to the house the frames were empty, just decorative, a reminder and a promise all in one.  Then Shiro realized that she was actually having trouble seeing, and convinced her to get an eye exam, and… well, they’re more hers than Matt’s, now, he supposes.

Still… the more things change, the more they stay the same.  The obituary and Pidge’s response to it are proof of that.  She’s still determined to find Matt.  Nothing is going to stop her.  Except, maybe, the need for sleep.

Shiro settles into the armchair, in the perfect position to watch over her and read a little at the same time.  He pulls out his new Kindle from where it’s been sitting on the TV table.  He got it from Coran at Christmas-time, but he hasn’t had a chance to turn it on and screw around with it until now.  Just too much going on, between Keith and… well, mostly Keith, with a little bit of Pidge and the rest of the kids thrown in.  It’s about time he’s gotten to sit down and have some me-time.

He opens the Kindle store and starts to look for something new to read.  He’s sick of witness testimony anecdotes—he’s thinking of something more science-y.  He debates whether or not he wants to read astronaut biographies or sci-fi.  He can’t decide.

Twenty minutes into staring blankly at the device and getting nowhere, he sets it down on his lap.  God, his focus is shot.  He sighs and hunches over, maneuvering around the store in search of something short.  A short story or two, maybe.  He downloads a couple of them, frowning at his screen.  Reading about clones and brainwashing in short, manageable doses does cheer him up a bit, he finds.  He reminds himself to recommend some of them to Pidge when she comes back to the land of the living.  With that decided, he nods to himself.

That’s enough reading for the day.  Time for something more productive.  Something like compiling a list of things to keep Pidge busy and wear her down enough to sleep at night like a normal person.  Gardening… cooking… things like that.  He’s going to get her back on track so help him… not that there’s anything wrong with being absolutely obsessed with bringing your brother back from maybe-dead-maybe-not limbo, but.  You know.  Physical, mental, and emotional limits and everything.  Voltron needs their tech nerd, and they can’t have her if she’s made herself non-functional.

He’s scribbling ‘get her to hack into the court records’ on the _not_ -to-do list when Allura walks into the room, twisting her hair into a bun.  Shiro waves to her—she nods back.

She’s been a little… distant, ever since their talk last week.  It’s something that Shiro understands.  It was a heavy talk, and they hashed out some things that have been hanging over them for years—it’s understandable that she’d be a little disconcerted about it.  Especially after so long spent holding everything in.  She’ll get over it, and they’ll get back to normal soon enough.  Maybe they’ll even find a normal where they can talk about things regularly without Allura blowing up at him and leaving the house covered in ash and soot.

That would be nice.

* * *

The rest of the day is uneventful.  Hunk and Keith finish up work before dinner, walking in covered from head to toe in engine oil and grinning twin grins of triumph.  Lance and Allura pause their homework marathon in order to give them both high fives.  Pidge is groggy but conscious.  Shiro is… happy.

It’s an odd feeling.  Strange in the way that it makes him realize that it’s been a while since he felt like this.  Good.  Simply and easily good.  With the trial on the horizon and all the House problems compiling it seemed so out of grasp, but… he’s glad that today was a good day.

The good feeling sticks around until he goes to sleep that night.  It’s there in his dreams, even… all the way up until he wakes in the middle of the night with the certainty that something is wrong.

He’s up before he knows it, trying to convince himself that there’s nothing to worry about.  How many times has he gotten up in a panicked frenzy only to realize that absolutely nothing is out of place?  Too many to count is how many.  He’ll get out to the kids’ rooms only to realize that the entire world is exactly as it should be.

Except… the midnight instinct is proven right the moment he gets to the hallway.  He sucks in a breath, striding purposefully down the hall.  Allura’s door is open, no one inside, which isn’t too unusual… but so is Keith’s door, and when Shiro pokes his head inside the room is as neat and clean as it was the day Keith moved in.

In a few quick strides, Shiro reaches the living room.  There he finds Pidge, who is holding the largest mouse, the rest of them in the cage sitting beside her.

“What’s going on?” he demands.  “Where’s Allura?  Keith?”

“Oh, you know how Allura is…” Pidge says, very obviously trying and failing to stay casual as she says it.

That is not the answer Shiro is looking for.  “Pidge.”

“Shiro,” she hedges.  Her reluctance to spill the beans infects the room with tension, mounting it higher and higher as she strokes the mouse with slightly shaky hands.

Shiro pushes a breath off his lungs.  Fine.  If he can’t get it out of her, he’ll figure it out another way.  He drags his hand down his face, pivoting in a circle on the ball of one foot.  His eyes drag along the walls of the living room, taking in every piece of furniture and the normal detritus on top of each one.  He tries to put the pieces together.  What pieces does he even have?

Pidge anxiously taps on her laptop’s casing, getting antsier and antsier by the second as Shiro marches back toward Keith’s room to double check that he wasn’t hallucinating.  He wasn’t.  They’re gone.  He comes back into the living room, hand over his mouth.  What does he _know_?

Not much.  Not enough.  They could be with friends but he doesn’t know.  They could be safe but he _doesn_ _’t know_.  “Damnit,” he mutters under his breath.  He’s getting panicky, his hand shaking.  What business could they have in the middle of the night?  What business could they have that required Keith to _pack up_ and _leave_?

Pidge finally can’t take it anymore.  “They… left,” she says, wincing as she does.  “Together.”

“ _Together_?” Shiro asks, too sharp.  Pidge nods.  With two quick strides, Shiro comes up to the front window.  Pidge watches with huge eyes as he flicks back the slats of the shade and looks out into the yard.  The light from the living room is dim and slotted but he can make out two vehicles on the driveway—two.  Not three.  The minivan is there, the truck is there, but the bike… Red… she’s gone.

Shiro doesn’t know why that, in particular, hits his chest like a bulldozer, but it does.  Keith cleaned out.  Fully, everything.  He’s been slowly collecting clothing and books and other knick-knacks ever since his arrival, so he must have been very choosy about what to take with him.  He could only fit what he could cram into the small storage space on the bike, or what would fit into the funny saddlebags that Hunk rigged up.  He packed up, and then he left on the bike that Shiro and Hunk helped him fix.

Are those the actions of someone who feels at home at House Voltron?  Shiro doesn’t know.

Allura, on the other hand, took her backpack and the bare essentials.  A couple changes of clothes, her hair care products.  She left the mice with Pidge.  So she planned to be gone a few days, but she wasn’t ready to completely uproot herself.  That has to be a good sign.  Right?

Right?

Phones.  Do they have their phones?  Allura must—she doesn’t go anywhere without that thing.

For a wild moment, Shiro thinks of asking Pidge to track Allura’s GPS.  Pin her location down so he can go after them.  Then he takes a deep breath and thinks about it and realizes that he can’t just exert his authority over them like that.  They’re both legal adults—they can leave if they want to.  He can’t _make them_ come back.

He can, however, do the next best thing.  “I’m calling Allura,” he says aloud.

Pidge nods, silent.  She says nothing in protest.  It’s hard to tell, but she seems… scared.  Like she’s struggling with herself between ratting out her fellow kids and wanting them _home again_.  Shiro takes that as a good sign.  As good a sign as he can at the moment.  Maybe he’s imagining it, but he hopes not because he _needs things to be better than this_.  Better than two of his kids running away from home in the middle of the night with no warning and no notes, vanishing off the face of the planet.

Allura’s phone doesn’t seem to want to help him out with that.  It rings and rings, seeming like it’ll go on forever.  She doesn’t answer.  When her voicemail picks up the call, Shiro just sighs and says, “I don’t know if Keith has his phone, but… I’m going to try him.  Allura, please call me back.”

If his voice wavers no one has to know.  No one but Pidge and Allura and the mice, anyway.

Keith, fortunately, answers his phone.  He picks it up on the third ring.  Shiro’s knees nearly give out in relief—he sinks onto the couch, his head dipping low as he presses the phone to his ear with his good hand.  From the sound of cars whipping past Shiro can tell that they just pulled over off the road… he lets himself hope for a moment that they haven’t gotten too far.  Maybe they’re just up the street on the main road, two minutes away.  Maybe they’ve barely gotten anywhere at all.

“ _Hey, Shiro_ ,” Keith says, voice wary.

“Keith, what are you _doing_?”

It comes out sharper than Shiro wants it to.  He tries to reel back the blank fright that’s causing his voice to harden into a cutting edge.  He’s not so sure he succeeds.

“ _We_ _’re going away somewhere.  We’ll be back, it’s just_ …”

Shiro locks eyes with Pidge.  He’s not imagining it this time—she looks hopeful as she watches him.  Hopeful that he’ll get them back.  “Just what?” Shiro asks, wondering if that’s even possible.  When Keith sets his mind on something, there’s _nothing_ that can bring him back.  And Allura… Allura is the secret powerhouse of Voltron for a reason.

“ _I_ just _…_ ”  Keith blows out, putting emphasis on the word.  “ _I talked to that lawyer and they still want me to testify even though my dad took the plea deal.  I have to do it._ ”

“Okay… that’s okay, that’s—”

“ _That_ _’s not okay at all.  Shiro.  I’m bringing Zarkon into the House and I can’t do that to you guys.  To you.  This trial… it’s my fault that Zarkon is creeping in.  I can’t bring it home_.”

The raw emotion in his voice makes Shiro’s lip quiver.  He’s so adamant about it, so strong and unwavering, and still, his voice breaks on the word ‘ _home_ ’.

“And Allura?” Shiro asks, fighting on, fighting to understand.

“ _She_ _’s mad at Zarkon.  She says_ —”

“ _Give me the phone_ ,” Allura says in the background.  He does.  She huffs, her voice resolute and nearly cold in comparison to Keith’s emotional display.  “ _Shiro, I offered myself as a witness against him.  I couldn_ _’t bring that into the House, either.  I’m sorry, but… it’s better this way_.”

Shiro closes his eyes, breathing deeply.  He doesn’t open them even as a door creeks down the hall, signaling that the rest of the house is up and awake.  “It’s not,” he says, when he finds his voice again.  “We should be facing this together.  Guys… I don’t know where you are, but you don’t have to do this.  You’re both adults and I know you can make your own decisions but this isn’t… you _don_ _’t have to do it like this_.  Come home.”

There’s silence after his little speech.  Someone shuffles on the other end and Shiro would give anything to see what they’re doing right now.  Are they sitting side by side on a curb, looking at each other?  Are they still on the bike, ready to take off again as soon as Allura hangs up?  Where are they?  How far do they intend to go?

What would have happened if Shiro slept straight through the night?  Woke up in the morning to find them gone?  Would he have even noticed?  Or would he have just assumed they went out for the day and that they’d be back, only to stay up late Sunday night waiting for two people who were never planning on coming back, at least not until they finished whatever mission they insisted they were on?

“Guys…” Shiro whispers.  “We’re stronger together.  I know it’s scary, and I know you want to protect the rest of us, but Zarkon is just a man and he’s not going to tear us apart.”

“ _I_ _’ll… think about it_ ,” Allura says.  “ _We love you either way, Shiro.  Don_ _’t forget that_.”

And then she’s gone, the call disconnecting. 

* * *

When Shiro sets his phone down, three pairs of eyes are watching him, waiting for the verdict.  He shakes his head a little.  “We’ll see.  They might be back.  But if not…”

They’ll just have to keep going without them, he doesn’t say.  He doesn’t quite have it in him to get the words out, no matter how true they are.

“Wait, so… they’re really gone,” Hunk says.  He has his arms crossed over his chest, his face young and strange-looking without his usual headband.  Shiro nods.  “Oh,” Hunk says.  “That’s… why would they do that?”

Shiro knows, but he… it isn’t quite clicking.  They want to protect the House, okay.  They want to keep Zarkon as far away as possible.  Okay.  But leaving… Shiro swallows.  How can they protect something they’ve torn apart?

Okay, no.  That’s a little dramatic.  Shiro forces down the whirlwind of emotions trying to prise open his throat and come out in a scream.  Or maybe a sob, he’s not really sure.  He forces his back straight and clears the gunk from his throat to say, “I don’t know.  Come here, guys… I’ll make some hot chocolate.”

It truly is a vigil this time, he finds, as he sets down the mugs in front of the three kids.  Lance and Hunk cuddle with him on the couch, murmuring at each other in sarcastic tones that barely cover the worry in their voices.  Shiro sits silently, one eye on the clock as he waits for a final verdict.  To come home or not to come home… that’s their question now.  He sips his cocoa, closing his tired eyes.

Only to open them again and see Pidge, huddled up in a blanket by the mice’s cage, staring blankly at her computer.  Her hands are still.

“Pidge, are you okay?” he asks.  The boys quiet down, following his gaze.

She continues staring, not really seeing.  “I wanted to stop them but I… I just couldn’t open my mouth?  Why couldn’t I open my mouth?”

Oh, no.  “It’s okay…” Shiro starts.

He’s cut off almost instantly as she comes to life, taking on the edge of hysteria that’s usually reserved for virtual encounters with information on her dad or her brother.  Her voice is panicky, banking sharply upward in pitch as she says, “No, it’s _not_!  I didn’t want them to leave, why couldn’t I just—just _say that_?!”

Shiro raises his hand placatingly.  “Sometimes things are hard to—”

“ _Rrrrrrrgh_!  I know, I fucking know!  Things are hard, _whatever_!  I just thought that after losing Dad and M-Matt that I’d be better at, at—holding on to people.  But no, I _failed_.”

Shiro opens his mouth.  Closes it.  Folds his hand over his lips and thinks on it, stumped.

He’s never… had that problem.  It’s just not what he himself does in the face of crisis.  He can be unfocused, foggy, dissociating and he’ll still find a way to say exactly what he wants to say.  Lance, on the other hand…

Shiro levels a look at Lance, whose eyes go wide as he realizes what Shiro is getting at.  “No…” he whispers, looking from Shiro to Hunk to Pidge, who is now huddled down over her laptop with her hands in her hair.

Shiro does not relent.  He stares Lance down until the boy groans, his head lolling back.  Then he watches as Lance steps up to the plate to deal with this.

“Pidgey… you, um… you know how I lash out sometimes?” he asks.

“No, Lance, I’ve never met you before,” comes the response.  A little sharp, but Lance trucks onward.

“Well… you know that I don’t mean it when I do.  I say things and I think I mean them but they’re not what I want to say at all when I stop and think about it.  But in the moment they’re the only thing that will come out.”

Pidge’s red, puffy eye glares through her arms.  “Is there a point to this?” she asks, miserable.

“Uh, yeah.  The point is that sometimes you can’t say what you really want to say.  And sometimes that makes you feel guilty but… it’s just a mistake.  It doesn’t make you a bad person when you can’t get your words out right.  Right?”

Pidge sniffles, her face still hidden.

“Right, Pidgey?” Lance prods.

“Yeah, I… I guess, but…”  She lowers one hand, scrubbing a knuckle against her eyes to clear out the frustrated tears that are still hanging on.  “I just… you guys are my family and I feel like… I’m going to lose you, too?”

The more things change… the more they change… the more they change… the phrase circles around Shiro’s head in an unrelenting cycle.  Pidge’s world was turned upside-down once, twice… three times if you count the obituary.  She’s young, and scared, and everything was out of her control for most of her life.  Losing half her family, getting kicked out of her house… she’s barely had time to grasp that Voltron was here before that, too, was taken from her grasp.

Except… maybe not this time.  Maybe, this time, their faith will be rewarded and the others will come back.  Maybe.  Shiro just has to drink his hot chocolate, and hold Pidge in a protective hug, and _hope_.

* * *

Their prayers are answered just before dawn.  That’s when Allura and Keith trudge back inside, ruffled and unhappy.  Apparently, the bike broke down and they had to call Rolo for a ride.  Keith mutters that he’s sorry with his gaze pointed at the ground, hand holding tight to the duffel bag slung over his shoulder.  The duffel bag full of everything he had with him when he came to the house and more.  Things he’s collected, gifts he’s gotten… debris from his life with them.  Shiro’s is stupidly grateful that he took that much, at least.  That there was something of his life here worth taking with him when he ran.  

Pidge’s sharp eyes take all of that in and more.  “Don’t you dare do that again,” she warns, crossing her arms.  Lance and Hunk nod along.  Keith cracks the smallest of smiles, promising that he won’t.  Allura plucks the mouse from Pidge’s hair, nuzzling up to it like she’s glad to be back home.  And Shiro… Shiro pulls the two renegades into a hug.

“We’re going to do this together or not at all.  Understood?” he says.

“Yeah,” Keith whispers.  Allura nods into Shiro’s shoulder, her shoulders slumping.  Shiro makes sure to hold them just a little tighter for a moment before he opens his arms and lets them go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhhhhhhhhhh.


	7. 2/21/18 :: The Courthouse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The trial begins, Keith meets up with someone he hasn't seen in a long time, and Shiro thinks about gardening.

_This is it_.

Keith presses a hand down his front, staring at the suit-jacket in the mirror.  His eyes are deep, black wells staring himself down.  He looks overly-formal in the sharp black jacket.  He looks scared.

He breathes out through pursed lips.

_This is it._

They’ve been standing here for a while now.  Shiro bites his own lip, forcing himself to stay quiet through the process.  He doesn’t know for certain what’s going through Keith’s head, but he can take a guess—especially considering what’s going through his own. 

     _This is it_. 

Diaries full of life and ghosts marking death, pasts laid to rest and words drawn in strife.  It would be poetic if it weren’t dragging down the mood of the room.

   _This_ _… is it_.

So it is.  Shiro shakes his head a little.  The phrase doesn’t shake.  He doesn’t know when, or why, but those words have become the siren sound that sings when the hard decisions have to be made.  When heavy burdens come to hand.  Half a year ago, maybe more, he read them in a twenty-year-old diary that once belonged to Keith’s mother.  They marked the first half of the transition between life and death—like brackets, they delineated where one hand stopped writing for good and another picked up the pen in its stead. 

For a long time, that made Shiro sad.  It still does.  But he thinks he’s coming to terms with it now—it’s all just another form of change and change he knows intimately.  You can’t take in a bunch of abandoned teenagers without being ready for some _major_ change.  So the words?  The phrase that he’s hearing now, echoing around in his head?  He lets it do whatever it needs to do.  Shiro chews on the inside of his cheek and lets the words become whatever it is they need to become.  An omen?  A mantra?  He’ll know when it’s time. 

It’s just the two of them now—him and Keith.  The rest of the kids already left for school, Lance the last one out after frowning and rubbing at a black fingerprint on Keith’s collar.  He’d been wearing the shirt for two minutes, but it was no wonder there was a mark already.  Shiro had to pry the kid away from Red in order to try the shirt on in the first place.

Keith stares at the spot, losing himself to it.  Shiro takes the moment to study him from head to foot.  Compares him quietly to a picture he knows exists, a polaroid of two teenagers who would become the parents to a little preemie, intersex baby Keith, standing tall and proud and smiling for a camera.

Keith doesn’t look like that.  Sometimes he does—when he’s holding up a freshly cleaned bike part for Hunk to inspect, for instance—but right now all Shiro can see is uncertainty. 

There’s also the fact that he, too, has changed so much in the past ten or so months.  He isn’t the small, wiry seventeen-year-old who came to the House nearly a year ago.  He’s still not quite back to his pre-pregnancy physique.  He finally started to wear his binder again after months abstaining—it was too uncomfortable for most of the pregnancy, and the C-section did him no favors in that department—but his belly is still soft and, while not prominent, very obvious if you know what to look for.  He’s several inches taller than he was when he first arrived at House Voltron, too… nearing five eight, now, right on Lance’s tail.  His hair hasn’t been cut since before the Little Alien came.  Actually, Shiro muses, not since The Scare several months before that.  It curls around his ears, almost to his shoulders, scruffy and wild.  He just looks… different. 

What that means for the trial, Shiro doesn’t know.  Hopefully not much.  And for the one person at the trial who truly matters?  Well, it’ll be the first time he sees his dad in… Shiro doesn’t even know how long.  From what Keith has said, it’s been years since his dad even sent a letter, discounting the one that arrived in a box near Christmas.  His dad doesn’t know about the baby.  Doesn’t know that he changed his name to Keith.  Doesn’t know that he’s started HRT.  Doesn’t even know that the gender affirmation surgeries Keith had as a baby have caused him so much grief.  There’s a gap, ever widening, between the two of them.  Shiro has no idea what Keith thinks of that.

“You ready?” he asks.

“As I’ll ever be,” Keith says.

 

* * *

 

Shiro gets the answer to at least one of his questions at the courthouse.

They’re early.  According to the rough schedule the prosecuting lawyer sent out to their ‘team’, they have another three hours or so before Keith will be asked to come in and bare his past for a room of stuffy adults.  And because they’re so early, they have a chance to catch the exact person Keith is so conflicted to see.

Shiro assumes the man in front of them is Mr. Kogane.  He’s nothing special on first glance.  Or second, actually.  He’s just a tired man who looks out of place in a suit that’s a little too wrinkled.  Maybe older than Shiro but actually maybe not—maybe just tired enough that the lines in his face seem deeper and more permanent than the ones Shiro sees in the mirror.  His eyes slide over them at first, despite the fact that Keith goes rigid and stops right in front of him.  It takes him a moment to realize that they are the ones he’s looking for—when he does, he stands, a light frown dancing across his scarred brow.

“…Are you… Mr. Shirogane and—?”  He uses a name that makes Keith wince.  His uncertainty stains the air.  He’s a polite enough man, Shiro decides—there’s a southern undercurrent to his speech that turns his vowels long and gives cadence to the words.  Shiro tries to match this voice to the words he read in the diary— _we lost her_ —and finds that he can’t.  The man is utterly foreign to Shiro.  Keith, though… Keith seems to relax just a little at the sound.

“I go by Keith now,” Keith says.  It’s quick, clipped, but Shiro knows him well enough by this point to see the longing and the anxiety that drag the planes of his face downward.  His mouth is tight, his chin tilts down.  Shiro wants to know if this man feels as strong an urge to hug Keith as he does.  He curbs the territorial bent of that thought before it can become an issue.  This is about Keith.  Keith, who stands in front of the man who failed to raise him.

“Huh,” Mr. Kogane says.  It’s meaningless, a soundbite made of nothing but air.  He covers it with a cough.  “I, uh… I wasn’t expecting that.  Is this a… new development?”

Keith’s face is carefully guarded.  He rocks back on his heels, one shoulder ticking up into a half-shrug as he glances around.  “Not really.  I think you’re supposed to go in now.”

Mr. Kogane’s face twists, the expression suddenly so familiar to Shiro that he nearly reaches forward to give the man a reassuring pat on the shoulder.  “Don’t you want to stay and catch up?”

“Of _course_ I do,” Keith says, something breaking into his voice that makes a lump form in Shiro’s throat.  “I do.  But this is important.”

Mr. Kogane nods.  By ‘this’, he knows that Keith means the trial.  They _all_ know the stakes of this vast legal tangle that fastens them all together.  “That it is,” Mr. Kogane says, standing up.  He’s shorter than Shiro by a good few inches.  “I’ll catch you later, huh?”

Keith nods, and then the man is gone and it’s their turn to wait outside.

 

* * *

 

There’s a big question mark hanging in the air as they sit, alone, watching the people making their way across the courthouse.  _Testimony_ —Shiro folds his arms across his chest thinking about it.  They know so little about how it’ll go, if it will be good or bad or what.  It may well be a disaster.  But the waiting part?  That’s quickly becoming a top contender for ‘worst thing to ever happen to him’. 

You’d think that losing an arm would be a shoo-in for the number one spot, but to be quite honest, Shiro hardly remembers the actual event.  It’s so hazy, his memory so scrambled… it leaves a lot of room for other things to worm their way into the running.  Sitting in a hospital waiting room as his kid is having a C-section?  Yup, definitely up there.  Enduring Coran’s cheese trays?  You bet.  Watching as Keith sits, jaw tight, waiting to put himself under the harsh lights of the witness stand to tell the story of a childhood better left buried?  Bad.  Very bad.

“You doing okay?” Shiro asks for the third time, watching the muscle in Keith’s cheek clench from the corner of his eye.

“Fine,” Keith says, same as he has every time so far.  His eyes stay focused on nothing in particular.

It’s nothing like the crime dramas that Shiro plays during his lunch breaks.  The way the time stretches around them is lurid, like a fresh bruise—the sheer amount of time they have on their hands is chaffing.  In CSI there’s always something going on, something quick and chilling, a fast and witty one-liner following the reveal of a body in horrid condition.  Time is always so short—they have twenty-four hours to find a killer, to find the key witness, to piece together their case.  They don’t have to wait and wait and _wait_.

Shiro breathes out, barely a sigh, as his hand twitches up to rub the scar across his nose.  Keith won’t be called up for a while yet, it seems.  Stupid courtroom dramas… he really shouldn’t have started watching those things.  But google only got him so far, and it was hard finding anything credible that wasn’t bathed in legal jargon and sue him for taking the easy way out, damnit.  If only life were more like a drama… he’d kill for quick and witty right about now.

He’s somewhere between lamenting life and trying to perfectly recreate the Law and Order sound from memory alone when the door to the courtroom swings open beside them.  It’s just someone from the packed audience heading off for a bathroom break, but as the door swings slowly shut Shiro hears something that makes his blood run cold.  He snaps his head around, ears all but perked.

It’s simple, nothing he didn’t expect going in, but still… the words ‘Galra work ethic’ in a deep, cold voice more familiar to him than air jar something deep in his psyche.  This is it—this is real.  They really are in there, digging up the bodies that Zarkon has so studiously buried.

Huh.  It’s really happening.  Damn.  Consider Shiro officially awake.

“You okay?” Keith asks, at his side. 

Shiro levers his eyes off the closed courtroom door, turning back to the kid.  “Yeah, yeah…” he mutters.  He’s not, not really.  He’s about as ‘okay’ as Keith is ‘fine’.  There’s just… nothing he can do about it now.

The day wears on.  The trial breaks for lunch, everyone filing out.  Shiro makes sure they catch Keith’s dad, which they do, but he’s eager to miss the main attraction, the one that pulls in waves and waves of reporters that crowd them out of the hallway the moment the man in question steps out. 

Zarkon… ugh.  Shiro ducks his head and hustles them toward the front doors, leaving the buzzing in his rear-view mirror.

Lunch is… tense would be the word.  Shiro keeps quiet through a bowl of noodles at a little shop nearby, watching as Mr. Kogane struggles to build a bridge with sticks and mud.  Keith stands on the other side of the river, every step so careful on the bank as if he’s afraid of being swept away.  They don’t make much progress, and by the end, Shiro is just aching that much more.  Then, of course, it’s back to the waiting.

And waiting.

And _waiting_.

Shiro scrolls his phone, pretending that he can’t see the bored reporters stuck in the hallway with them creeping closer minute by minute.  It’ll be soon, he tells himself.  They’ll get to Keith’s testimony _soon_.

…They don’t get to Keith’s testimony. 

“It should be tomorrow,” the prosecutor says at the end of the longest day Shiro has ever lived.  He has a crick in his back that begs to be stretched out.

“Okay,” Keith says, his voice flat. 

“This case is a bit unusual, but I’m sure it’ll be tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“And if it’s not it’ll be Friday.  The courthouse is closed Saturday and Sunday and the trial will have to wait for Monday after that, but it really shouldn’t take that long.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.  Good.  And Shiro—have you thought any more about testifying yourself?”

Shiro jerks as far upright as his back will allow.  “Uh?” he says.  Eloquent.

The prosecutor shuffles some of the papers in the file he has on hand.  “It’s just, ah—where is—right.  Here.  We have a really good case, nearly water-tight, but there are a few holes and—your story would just… you’d really be helping us if you told your story.”

Shiro swallows.  “Right,” he says.  “I’ll think about it.”

He said that the last time the prosecutor reached out.  And the time before that.  They both know he’s stalling, putting off his real answer.  Is he going to do it, is he not, does it really matter?  Shiro swallows.  Every time the question comes up he feels like he takes a metaphorical step backwards.  Enough steps and he’ll find his back in the corner.

He knows what he’ll say when it comes right down to it.  When he has no more options, when it’s do or die… he knows what option he’ll take.  But for now, he’s happy putting it off for just a little longer.

 

* * *

 

Wandering through the House later that night to the sound of a half-tuned ukulele that Lance acquired from god knows where, Shiro is slow to approach the living room.  He has to prepare himself as he steps across the threshold, steeling his nerves and cementing his resolve.  He's seen this before, and such a sight does not bode well.  The way Keith lies across the couch and point blank ignores the pile of college brochures that Hunk gently sets at his head is the spitting image of the way Allura’s smile iced over every time someone would ask where she was planning to continue her education.  They’re different, sure, in the way that Keith bleeds apathy instead of cradling a bone-deep fury, but the mechanisms are the same.  The denial of any need to prepare for the next step.  The refusal to work with anyone who tries to help.  The _stares_.

Shiro shudders to himself.  He was convinced he’d never see a look so cold again, now that Allura is finally taking flight.  He’s deluded himself.

“I looked through them for you,” Hunk says, a glimmer of hope in his voice that he’s trying to suppress under the weight of Keith’s dead eyes.  “You know, just to highlight some things I think you’d like.  There’s an engineering program that I already applied for and it seems like something you might also be interested in?”

He doesn’t mention the fact that he’s already been accepted to the program, plus like five others.  Nor does he mention the fact that most application deadlines closed back in December, while Keith was stuck worrying about the Little Alien. 

Keith says nothing.  He does shift a little, picking up one of the brochures… but when his stare turns on it he doesn’t look like he’s seeing anything at all.  If that’s not a Mood then Shiro doesn’t know how to use the word Mood.

It’s also very troubling.

“So… you’ll look through them?” Hunk asks.

Finally, Keith blinks, like he’s waking up for the first time this entire conversation and just realized what’s happening.  “Oh.  Uh, yeah.  Sorry, Hunk.”

Hunk nods in relief at finally getting a response and backs off.  Shiro ruffles his hairband on his way to Keith’s side, where he settles down beside the boy, squishing him against the back of the couch so they can lay shoulder to shoulder for a while and ponder.  Shiro about the events of the day and Keith about… Shiro has no idea.  His father?  The court case?  The House?  The baby?  

Maybe that’s part of the issue.  There’s just… so much.  All the time.  A constant thrum of white noise in the background, pushing through into Shiro’s every activity.  It’s been a constant for years now.  Just… slightly too much to contain, slightly too much to handle, a rot with a source unseen.

It’s at times like these that Shiro thinks about Alfor’s trumpet vines.

See, Alfor was a man of many talents.  He was into robotics, botany, politics… name a pursuit and he probably tried it at some point.  He was a man of many talents.  A Renaissance man, a jack of all trades, whatever you want to call it.  He had an effortless way about him—he picked up anything he set his sight on.  And one day, he decided to plant trumpet vines—his wife’s favorite flower—in the garden plot in their front yard.

It seemed a simple enough venture, especially for a man so caring and bright as Alfor.  Shiro remembers sitting in the yard in his uniform one day after a round of training exercises in the simulators, watching as Alfor dirtied his hand with a soft smile on his face.  Melanor was pregnant then—it was before the cancer that took her away when Allura was two, before the accident that took Alfor when she was ten, a time when they thought things would always be peaceful.  Zarkon was a nuisance already, distancing himself from the family, but it was one black mark amid a veritable field of white. 

So they thought.

The seeds went in, the sprouts grew, the vines shot up… and Alfor was rewarded with yellowing plants and wrinkled leaves, sickly things unfit to produce flowers.  He tried again, with a different watering schedule—same deal.  He tried and tried, but it didn’t seem to matter what he did—the plants were unhappy, sickly, yellow.  No amount of plant food or care made a difference.  It was like the old tale of the emperor who gave out seeds and said that the person who could grow the most beautiful plant would become his heir, and the little boy who tried and tried and tried to grow the seeds that would never actually grow.

One day, Alfor finally broke down and instigated a professional investigation.  He looked at his water, he looked at his seeds, he looked at his soil… and there he found it.  A blight in the soil itself, a nasty parasitic thing that survived by eating slowly away at the roots of anything stupid enough to germinate in its territory.

This… the trial, and Zarkon, and Keith’s place here at House Voltron… these things are like that.  There’s a rot in the roots, buried under the dirt but felt everywhere, to the very tips of each individual leaf.  Shiro can see it—no amount of nourishment, no structure or support, is going to help keep Keith afloat until they can address the issues in the very earth itself.

Beside him on the couch, Keith folds his arms across his stomach and breathes out slowly.  His eyes are still distant.  Thinking, thinking, thinking.  Shiro wonders just what it will take to clean out the blight.  For Alfor it was a month-long project that involved digging out all the bad soil, putting down plastic, and refilling the gouge in the earth with new, fresh soil.  Can you do that with a human being, though?  Where do you start to dig?  What tools do you use?  How deep do you have to _go_?

It’s a series of questions that Shiro doesn’t feel equipped to answer.  Coran might know… or he might just tell Shiro to talk to B.  Shiro sighs.  He wishes he _could_ talk to B.  But his relationship with her shriveled and died just like the trumpet vines, just like Keith’s peace and happiness, just like every good thing he’s ever had.

Okay, no, that’s a little dramatic.  But still… he wants a break.  He wants things to get better for Keith.  And they will… eventually.  It may take months… or years… but eventually they will have good, clean soil to put down roots.


	8. 2/26/18 :: The Lift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zappy gets handsy, Pidge achieves air, and Shiro has a good night.

A week straight.  Five business days.  That’s how long, at _least_ , they’re going to have to wait for Keith’s testimony.  They got to him (and Allura as well) on the second day of the preliminary hearing, but, as Shiro was to find out from the frazzled prosecutor, his part in the trial wasn’t anywhere near complete.  Something about the preliminary hearing being a presentation of evidence to prove that they have a case, which will then be followed by an actual trial if the judge calls for it.

“And she will.  Call for it, I mean,” the prosecutor says, referring to Judge Hira.  A severe woman with slicked-back hair, Judge Hira does not strike Shiro as the kind of person to have much patience for the mild-mannered prosecutor.  Still, the number of witnesses he’s managed to scrounge up is impressive, and there doesn’t seem to be a way for Zarkon to weasel his way out of a trial.  Not this time.

In any case, the judge has allowed Keith to go back to school in the meantime, with the understanding that Shiro will pull him out of class and transport him to the courthouse when he’s summoned.  So that’s that.

More or less.

Shiro decides to operate on the ‘less’ option, pushing away thoughts of the trial for a moment or two so that he can properly examine the Western wall of the Red Room.  _Happy early birthday to me_ , he thinks, taking it all in.

On the left side of the wall, covering both the corkboard and the paint where there were once a series of exploded schematics of various motorcycle parts, there is now an uninterrupted stream of equations and ciphers.  Dominating the right side of the wall is an enormous map of the continental United States, already riddled with pin holes.  In the center is an array of news snippets, pages from confidential files, and a lot of blurry photographs, all with one thing in common: _Matthew Holt_.  His name, his face, his fingerprints, his college meal plan, anything that has to do with him that Pidge could scrape up in the last three years since the disappearances of Matt and Sam Holt.  Various strings stretch from these out to the map and the equations, linking all the pieces together in a way that only Pidge understands. 

There’s so much paper on the wall that Shiro can barely see the red paint that they so carefully picked out.  It’s overpowered.  Dominated completely.  There is nothing but Matthew Holt, and yet there’s still so little.  Not enough to find him—not enough to raise him from the dead.  All of this… and there’s still nothing.

Shiro drums his fingers against his prosthesis, challenging himself to see something in the mess that Pidge herself hasn’t.  Maybe there really is something there—maybe they’ll be able to help her find it.  That’s the reason Keith let her take over the corkboard in the first place.  So that it would be spread out and easier to see, so she could get fresh eyes helping her look.  He said it like it was something he’s had experience with before, like he’s been manic and frustrated and trying to puzzle together pieces from a seemingly infinite jigsaw puzzle with no end and no beginning, no defined edges, no end point in sight.

Unfortunately, no one has been able to suss out anything that Pidge herself hasn’t spotted already.  Shiro certainly can’t see anything.  It just looks like chaos to him.  Maybe it seems endless because it _is_ endless.  There’s a word for that—futile.  This search seems futile.

He doesn’t say it aloud.  Pidge doesn’t need to hear that.  She’s sitting on the floor in a corner, pounding out her homework for the week so that she doesn’t get in trouble.  Getting in trouble means getting her laptop taken away, and she’s lucid enough to understand that the search can’t go on if she doesn’t take care of her everyday duties.  Homework, school, a meal or two every once in a while—these are the things Pidge forces herself to do so that she can keep looking, keep tearing apart the great cosmic hay bale in search of the needle that is her brother.

“Make sure you eat something today,” Shiro says when she pauses to glare at the textbook sitting beside her.  She mumbles something in return that Shiro can’t quite understand.  Maybe it was agreement—maybe not.  Either way, Shiro makes a plan to reach out to G one more time to see if they can get a house visit.  One hour-long session a week with the counselor is not enough for Pidge right now.

That’s a problem for later.  Right now, Shiro has plans to take Keith to see one special little alien.

The drive there is the same as ever.  They make it across town all in one piece.  Sonia lets them in and Shiro accepts some tea from her, purposefully NOT thinking about the fact that Lance, still miffed about the fact that he wasn’t allowed to give Sonia and Maggie Voltron nicknames, is now calling them S&M ‘after that Rihanna song’.  He fails to not think about this.  He thinks about it excessively.

In the meantime, Keith disappears into the back of the house and reappears with the baby tucked under his chin.  Maggie follows close behind, a soft smile on her face and an armful of paperwork pinned to her hip.  After she hands it off to Sonia, she heads to the couch and sits beside Keith, kicking her feet up onto the cushions and propping her head on her hand.  She’s cut her long red hair since the last time they were here—it’s now in a chin-length bob that curls under her jaw.  Very cute.

As is the way that Keith focuses on the baby, letting them raise their head to babble in his ear and pat at his cheeks and nose.  Zappy’s hair is coming in thicker now, a dark, silky black reminiscent of Keith’s own, if not a touch or two lighter.  Their eyes, just as dark, are wide and inquisitive.  All the baby websites say that a baby’s personality starts to come out around eight weeks—Zappy, now nearing twelve, is bubbly and excitable.  Keith laughs as fingers probe at his mouth, sticking his tongue out.  His smile softens into something warm and happy when he nudges the baby’s hand away and Zappy grasps his fingers.  They’re growing so fast—both of them are.  It makes Shiro smile into his hand.

“You know you guys are allowed to come around whenever you want, right?” Sonia whispers near Shiro’s ear.  “I feel like I don’t see you enough.” 

She’s leaning over the back of the chair he’s sitting in, her work bundled up in her arms.  She’s a lawyer, too, Shiro muses suddenly—maybe he ought to talk to her about this Zarkon thing. 

Or maybe not.  Maybe they ought to keep Sonia and Maggie away from the chaos in the rest of their lives.  Keep this place as a secret garden, a safe haven, a peaceful space where Keith can melt into the Little Alien whenever he needs to.  Even when Zappy is upset and crying Keith seems to find some sense of peace and purpose here, learning how to hold them and rock them back to sleep. 

It’s times like those when Shiro really feels the bitter-sweet pain of giving the baby up.  He knows it was never his decision, but still, he thinks about how he suspected right from the beginning that Keith would be a great parent.  Just as long as he got a little bit of help along the way, Keith could have done this on his own.  He’s empathetic, sensitive—he’s always been people-oriented, even if he shows it in a different way than the others.  It would have been hard, sure, but…

It wasn’t to be, though.  As it is, Keith is definitely on track to being the greatest uncle a kid ever had.  Shiro breathes out, his eyes never leaving Keith.  “Yeah, we know,” he says, a little delayed, to Sonia’s query.  They know they can come any time they want to.  They can’t dedicate all their hours to Zappy, but they’re doing what they can with what they have, and that’s good enough.

That’s good enough.

 

* * *

 

When they get home a few hours later, both of them covered in copious amounts of baby spit and nursing the pains of hair pulled by little hands, they find Hunk on the kitchen floor frowning over the innards of the oven.  Back to their usual programming, it is—Shiro barely manages not to groan aloud.  “Hunk,” he says, leaning heavily on the kitchen door frame and pinching his nose between two fingers.  “What are you doing.”

“…It was ticking again,” Hunk says through the screwdriver in his mouth, already in defense of his actions.

Shiro sighs.  “Did you at least feed Pidge before you started this?”

“Uhhh… no?”

For the love of—“Hunk.  You’re supposed to be the reliable one.”

Hunk backs off from a chunk of twisted tubing, holding both hands up, contrite.  “Look, she threatened to throw a pilot pen at me.  Do you know how much those hurt on impact?  Lance, back me up here,” he says, pointing one hand to the side.

Lance, appearing from beneath the dining room table with a lollypop in his mouth, is quick to do just that.  “It’s true, Shiro.  We were protecting our soft, vulnerable bits.”

Of course they were.  “Look, I know I don’t need to tell you this because you already know, but she’s going through a rough patch right now.  She needs us to help her take care of herself until things get better.  So please.  Just… please.  For the love of god.  Feed Pidge.”

“On it,” Hunk says.  He stares down at the mess in front of him.  “Umm… would cold-prep chicken-salad sandwiches work?”

Yes.  Yes they would.  At this point Shiro would be happy to get a single, un-sauced macaroni into Pidge.  Her diet of fruit snacks and stale cereal is going to catch up to her, soon, and he fears the day it happens.

First things first—they have to get Pidge away from the corkboard.  The _quote unquote_ ‘corkboard’.  It’s no longer just a corkboard, it is the sprawl of a warring mind, a tormented soul laid bare… it is the space between sanity and insanity, no man’s land. 

Someone is going to have to Take The Plunge.

“I’m out,” Keith says immediately.  “I’m tired and I need a shower.”  He trudges off down the hall, giving them a wave as he goes.

“Fine, so Keith is out,” Shiro says.  There go his big guns, but sure.  Fine.  That leaves Hunk and Lance and—yeah, no, Allura is out, too.  Literally.  Her door is open wide, bedroom abandoned.  Darnit.  So just Hunk and Lance.  Hunk, at least, has the manpower, and Lance has… well… whatever Lance has.

Hm.  Is it enough?

Hunk taps a finger on his chin, also thinking hard.  “If it weren’t for the pilot pens I could just… carry her into the kitchen,” he says, obviously on the same track as Shiro.  “Lance… think you can do anything to help me out with that?”

Lance grins.  “What kind of question is that?  Of _course_ I can!”  He aims two finger guns at Hunk, then at Shiro for good measure, winking an exaggerated wink.  “Sneaking is my middle _name_ , my main babes and bros!  Just watch the master at work!”

Sneaking is definitely _not_ his middle name, but Shiro chooses to have faith in Lance.  Just this once.  What’s the worst that can happen?

Bad thoughts, bad thoughts.  Shiro needs to focus or every bad outcome he can imagine is going to come true.  Focus… _focus_ …

Okay.  He’s got his head in the game.  Time for mission impossible: the Pidge removal. 

In a single file line, they pad down the hall, shushing each other the whole length of the space between the kitchen and the first door on the right.  They get there without mishap.  ‘ _One_ ,’ Hunk mouths.  ‘ _Two_ _… three_!’

Mission _start_.  Lance enters the Red Room, somersaulting across the carpet and nearly running into the bed frame.  Shiro snorts.  Luckily, Pidge is working on her laptop and doesn’t notice.  Or, more likely, she does notice and just doesn’t care enough to raise her head.  This is good—this might work.  Shiro watches closely over Hunk’s shoulder as the larger boy leans through the doorframe, getting her attention with a strategic call of her name. 

“Pidge?  You want some dinner yet?”

Her voice is sharp from where she sits, all alone, inside the room.  “How many times do I have to say no before you leave me alone?  Stop bugging, Hunk.”

Hunk eyes Lance, still creeping up on Pidge’s other side.  “Okay, but—”

Her head rolls back, her eyes closing.  Lance freezes for a moment before tipping forward onto his hands and knees, continuing to crawl just behind her. 

“ _Hunk_ —” she whines.

Hunk clears his throat.  Two feet away.  “Just listen—”

“—I swear to god—”

One foot.  “—we’ve got—”

“—I said _no_ —”

Six inches.  “—but _sandwiches_ —”

“— _Hunk, you have two seconds before I—!_ ”

And then, with a warrior’s cry so loud that it echoes from one end of the house to the other, Lance grabs the pack of pens and darts out of the room, high-fiving Shiro on his way past.

“Oh, fuck you!” Pidge yells after him.  “God, if you think this will get me out of here you are _sorely_ mistaken—”

“PHASE TWO!” Lance yells from the other room.  He pops back over, pilot pens successfully stashed away.  “Hunk, go!”

“Alright,” Hunk says.  “Time to get _serious_.”

“Whoo!  Do it, Hunky!” Lance raises his phone.  The video recorder is already up.

Hunk, finally crossing the threshold into the Red Room, snorts a breath out his nose like a bull.  “I’m doing it!” he yells, psyching himself up.

“Yeah?” Lance says, equally psyched.

Hunk rears his head back and howls.  “ _Yeah_!” 

Pidge eyes the two of them, one eyebrow cocked.  “What are you—?”

Shiro meets her eyes, raising both hands in a shrug.  Then he steps away from Hunk, giving him space.  Like an Olympic power-lifter, Hunk rolls up his sleeves and hikes up his pants.  Pidge yelps as he grabs her by a knee and a bicep.  Then, letting out a grunt, he hoists her right above his head. 

Lance whoops.  Shiro smiles.  Pidge screams. 

Hunk, unphased, lets out a victory yell. 

It takes very little effort on Hunk's part, Shiro muses, as he watches the chaos unfold.  Like lifting an empty shoe box or a couple of grapes.  Even when Pidge squeals and starts to squirm in his hands, his grip never falters.  He weathers it all with grace, breathing calmly and evenly through her screams of, “Let me down!  Let me down!  You demon!  I was _working_!  Let me _down_ —!”

“Nope!” Hunk sings, hefting her a few inches higher.  His hand lets go of her bicep and instead braces itself on her back, holding her aloft like a dad holding a small child.  He then starts to turn in place, spinning in a little circle.  She tries to be mad—oh does she try—but after a few seconds of the ridiculousness of being lifted and twirled like the worst ice-dancing partner in the history of the world, she starts to break down.    Her head flops back, loose and relaxed in Hunk’s rock-solid grip.  Giggles cascade down.

Hunk grins.  “There we go!  Wasn’t so hard, now was it?  Now—we feast!  Lance, get the bread from the fridge!  The garlic loaf—you know the one!”

“Yes, Sir!” Lance chirps, stuffing his phone into Shiro’s hand.  Shiro raises it to capture a few more slow circles of the two kids, grinning despite himself.  The camera catches Pidge’s laughter when Hunk starts to carry her toward the kitchen—it doesn’t, however, catch the shininess of her eyes.  That is for Shiro alone to see.  By the time Hunk lowers her down into a chair, Pidge has sobered up somewhat, passing a quick hand across her face before she crosses her arms and huffs to show her (mostly fake) annoyance. 

“Well?  Where’s the feast I was promised?” she asks.  Hunk provides—expertly mixed chicken salad with cranberries and walnuts spread on slices of toasted garlic loaf, plated with fresh greens and sliced baby carrots.  He presents it like a diamond necklace, tilting the plate under the light to show off the dressing, and Pidge has just started to eat when Keith appears, scrubbing a towel over his hair.  He’s appropriately amazed when they tell the story of how they got Pidge out of the Red Room.

“You carried Pidge?  _Above your head_?”

Lance smacks both hands on the table, winding up into a drumroll before he says, “Yeah, dude, he sure did.  You really missed out.”

Keith sticks out his lower lip in a bit of a pout.  “Oh,” he says.  “Guess I did.”

“I could do it again,” Hunk offers, setting Pidge off giggling again.

“No, please don’t,” she says.  “I’m eating.  Or is that _not_ what you carried me out of there to do?”

“No, it is.  Continue.”  Hunk appraises Keith for a moment.  “Actually, you’re not that much heavier than she is.  Want me to lift you?”

No, nooope, vetoing that one.  “Not in the house.  And not on a hard surface.”  Shiro thinks for a moment.  “In a pool, maybe, where the water will soften the pull of gravity.”

“Aw, but Shiro—”

“No, Lance.”

“ _Fine_.”

Hunk doesn’t pout often, but when he does he usually gets whatever he wants.  It’s just in the nature of the House to give him everything he asks for because he provides so much support and gives so much back.  This time, however, Shiro’s stance is rock-solid.  He is not going to budge first.

“It’s okay, Hunk,” Keith says as Hunk wilts.  He gives Hunk a small pat on the shoulder.  “I know you can do it.”

“Thanks, Keith.”  Hunk sniffs.  Whether it’s out of disappointment or gratitude Shiro isn’t sure, but it’s not going to move him.  It’s not.

“You know what this means, though, right?” Lance asks, glossing right over the disappointment part.  He pops up between the two of them and throws an arm across each of their shoulders, grinning widely and ignoring the face that Keith pulls that clearly says he didn’t ask for the contact.  “Pool time!”

“It’s February,” Pidge deadpans, staring at them.

“Not for long!” Lance crows, wiggling where he stands, at the same time as Keith contemplatively says, “How bad can it really be?”

God.  These kids are going to be the end of Shiro.  Even the adult ones test him.  Pidge and the ciphers, Lance and his impulse issues, Keith and his complete lack of self-preservation… jesus.  Shiro spends a good long moment regulating his breathing—in for a count of ten out for a count of fourteen, nice and slow—and only tunes back in at the sound of his name, which is being called repeatedly. 

“Shiro.  Shiro.  _Shiro_.  I want a dog.”

Not this again.  “We have mice,” Shiro says, frowning down at Lance.

Lance waves him away with a twirl of his wrist.  “Yeah, but I want a dog.”

“We’re not getting a dog.”

Still with that contemplative tone, Keith says, “…I’d like a dog.”

Hunk, perking back up now, quickly follows onto the bandwagon.  “Yeah, the mice are like, _alright_ ,” he says.  “But dogs?  _So good_.”

Shiro sucks in a deep breath, pushes it out again, pulls in a deeper one, and says, “We are not getting a dog any time soon.”

The trio of boys breaks out into whines. “Why not?” Lance demands.

Pidge laughs like it’s obvious.  “Because y’all are already too much to handle,” she snarks, grinning as Lance yelps and lets out a ‘hey!’.  “It’s true,” she says, turning her nose in the air. 

“For real, though, why not?” Hunk asks.  Keith leans closer, very invested in the conversation.

Tipping back in his chair just a bit, Shiro stares up at the ceiling for a moment.  God, what a can of worms.  He chooses not to open it, instead going with the practical explanation, which is, “Three of you are planning to go to college this year.  The three of you that have expressed the desire for a dog, need I remind you.  I’m not letting you get a pet that I’m going to have to take care of on my own.”

Keith, the sly bastard, eyes him closely.  “You don’t want a dog?” he asks.

Shiro sniffs.  “Not at all.”

“Not at _all_?”

Nope.  Nope.  Nope.  “ _Nope_.”

Keith’s sharp eyes do not leave his face, and Shiro feels the sweat build up at his pits.  Because the thing is… that’s a lie.  A pure fabrication.  He LOVES dogs.  Had one before his stint at the Garrison fell through.  With Adam.  He lost more when Adam took the dog than he did when Adam broke up with him and he still hasn’t gotten over it. 

Actually, thinking back on it, that’s probably the number one contributing factor to his and Adam’s strained not-friendship now.  Shiro sees him in the grocery store and he remembers Ollie.  Ollie and her cute fuzzy snout… the spot on her rump… _ugh_ …

The conversation drifts, Keith’s eyes eventually fall away, and Shiro silently mourns for the pets that have been taken away from him throughout his life.  Ollie, taken by Adam during the breakup… the cat, Kova, that Zarkon took from Coran’s house and gave to his wife Honerva… the guinea pigs left behind at his parents' house when CPS took him away… he really hasn’t had much luck with pets.  Even the mice are eventually going to be taken from him—when Allura leaves she’s going to take them with her and then what will Shiro have?

Nothing.  Zip.  Nada.

God, maybe they _should_ get a dog…

Shiro is seriously considering it when Pidge finally gets up to leave, heading back to her work.  She hung out for forty whole minutes after dinner, a number that Shiro considers a success.  At this point, distracting her from her Matt search for more than fifteen minutes is a top-tier, champagne-popping triumph.  He shares a few high-fives with the boys and then retreats to his room for some quiet reading time before bed.

He’s still got a week straight—five business days—of waiting ahead of him, but tonight?  Tonight was good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cheers!

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still not versed in many of the topics I'm writing in right now--if you are, for instance, intersex and would like to guide me toward better information, please do! 
> 
> You can talk to me at the-ghost-of-kirishima-eijirou.tumblr.com
> 
> Let me know what you think, guys~


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